This report is a reprint from the August 29, 2002 Patricia Seybold Group's Strategic Research Service. It has been reproduced here as originally published. Patricia Seybold Group Strategic Consultants & Thought Leaders Hitting the Exploratory Web Services Bull’s-Eye How We Rated the Support for the Exploratory Phase of Web Services in Seven of the Leading Web Services Deployment Environments By Susan E. Aldrich Customers.com and Customer Scenario are registered trademarks and Customer Flight Deck and Quality of Customer Experience (QCE) are service marks of the Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. 85 Devonshire St., 5th Fl., Boston, MA 02109 USA • www.psgroup.com Customer-Centric Solutions / Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s-Eye Hitting the Exploratory Web Services Bull’s-Eye How We Rated the Support for the Exploratory Phase of Web Services in Seven of the Leading Web Services Deployment Environments By Susan E. Aldrich August 29, 2002 NETTING IT OUT This Bull’s-Eye report presents the highest-level summary of our analysis, evaluation, and com- parison of the Web Services Exploratory Phase coverage of seven of the leading Web Services Deployment Environment solutions: IBM Web- Sphere 5.0, BEA WebLogic Server Version 7.0, Oracle Oracle9IAS, Sun ONE Application Server 7, Microsoft .NET Framework, Macro- media JRun and ColdFusion MX, and Systinet WASP. Web Services Deployment Environments must provide deployment, runtime, and management capabilities, as well as enable integration with existing infrastructure, management, and secu- rity technologies. For the Exploratory Phase of Web Services, Macromedia and Microsoft solutions earned a 1, our top score, followed by Systinet and Ora- cle with a 2, then IBM and BEA with scores of 3. We ranked Sun with a 4, and no solution earned a 5, the lowest score. (For complete de- tails, see our series of reports on Web Services Deployment Environments at the end of this report.) Note, however, that this Bull’s-Eye only ad- dresses the features associated with the Ex- ploratory Phase of Web Services Deployments. In the coming weeks, we will offer Bull’s-Eyes on a number of other aspects of Web Services Deployment Environments. Don’t be surprised if the rankings for each Bull’s-Eye are quite dif- ferent. WEB SERVICES DEPLOYMENT ENVIRONMENTS Evaluation Criteria In our evaluation and comparison of the explora- tory phase support in Web Services Deployment En- vironments, we considered: • Whether the product offered sufficient produc- tivity features for developers in the exploratory mode • Whether the product provided sufficient interop- erability and integration features • Whether the product supported a range of secu- rity approaches • Whether the product incorporated sufficient management features and low-end pricing What Is a Web-Services Deployment Environment? In our view, a Web Services deployment envi- ronment has the following responsibilities: • Component Deployment. Provide tools that will expose existing application parts (compo- nents, programs, and objects) as Web services. This includes creating WSDL, the wrapper, and the SOAP interface for each Web Service, as well as listing the service on a UDDI registry or other directory. • WSDL and XML Schema Support. Provide descriptions of all deployed Web Services for 2 • Hitting the Exploratory Web Services Bull’s-Eye © 2002 Patricia Seybold Group potential clients and support the XML data typ- ing system. • SOAP Support. Provide, or integrate with, a SOAP service that manages the sending, routing, and receiving of SOAP messages; XML-to- language type mapping; application invocation; and propagation of error messages. • Runtime. Provide an application runtime envi- ronment for Web Services with configuration and lifecycle management, provide fault toler- ance and recovery, log, trace, and enable per- formance tuning of active environment. • Security. Provide runtime services for providers and requestors to verify authentication, proof of origin, message integrity, and message privacy. Web-Services Technology Categories Generally speaking, the Web Services technolo- gies you’ll be considering include development and assembly environments, deployment environments, directories, Web Service infrastructure services, and adaptive business process environments. Our land- scape of the Web-Services space is presented in Il- lustration 1. These aren’t exactly product categories yet, but represent more of a continuum. In other words, the Web Services market has not yet agreed upon what should be expected from a deployment environment, or assembly product, or business process manage- ment product. Web Services Technology Landscape Development and Assembly Environment Development and Assembly Environment Service Infrastructure Services Provisioning Billing Authorization Identity Authentication Discovery Auditing User Session Management State Management Transaction Management .NET J2EE Description Web Services Deployment Runtime Component Deployment SOAP Description Security Application ServerApplication Server Web Services Deployment Runtime Component Deployment SOAP Description Security .NET Server Directory Services Directory Services UDDI Services Adaptive Business Process Environment Adaptive Business Process Environment © 2002 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Illustration 1. The landscape for Web Services includes a range of technologies, spanning both the Service re- questor’s environment and the Service provider’s environment. In this diagram, the requestor application runs in a .NET environment, and the provider’s application runs in a Java environment. Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s-Eye • 3 © 2002 Patricia Seybold Group WHAT IS THE EXPLORATORY PHASE FOR WEB SERVICES? Web Services Adoption Phases Web Services standards and technologies are ma- ture enough to support three phases of Web Services applications: exploratory, preparatory or internal, and controlled or external. EXPLORATORY. In the exploratory phase, IT is learning to build and deploy Web Services, to design effective Web Service application architectures, and to control and manage a Web Services application environment. Virtually all companies employing programmers have someone exploring Web Services today. PREPARATORY & INTERNAL. In the preparatory phase, IT develops and internally deploys Web Ser- vices that will, in the future, interact with applica- tions outside the line of business or enterprise. CONTROLLED & EXTERNAL. In the controlled phase, these services are offered to external users, those outside IT’s span of control. If these applica- tions have stringent requirements for transaction in- tegrity, the Web Services providers and consumers will negotiate how each will handle long-running transactions, exceptions, authentication, and mes- sage integrity, for which no Web Service standards yet exist. STANDARDIZED. By 2005, Web Services standards and technologies will mature sufficiently to support the standardized phase of applications. In this phase, trading partners don’t have to be in a close relation- ship and establish how to manage business process integrity in order to provide and consume Web Ser- vices. In order for standardization to take hold, three key transformations must occur. First, the missing standards must emerge. Second, the roles of devel- opment, deployment, and orchestration products have to be established. Finally, patterns for basic interactions in an industry or community have to evolve. Exploratory Phase Requirements PRODUCTIVITY. In the exploratory phase, it must be easy to use existing code—ideally, by automati- cally wrapping and publishing any type of code, stored procedure, or application adapter as a Web Service. Programming the support for custom data types should be straightforward. And the environ- ment should support synchronous and asynchronous messages. SECURITY. The environment should be easily ex- tended or customized to provide special handling for SOAP messages in order to enable specialized secu- rity processing. INTEGRATION AND INTEROPERABILITY. The environment should support standardized mecha- nisms (e.g., JCA, ADO, JDBC, ODBC, and MQ adapters) to interact with existing systems, including database, .NET, J2EE Application Servers, and mid- dleware. MANAGEABILITY AND SCALABILITY. Establish- ing the Web Services deployment environment must be simple and rapid. Even if the development envi- ronment already exists, it needs to be very easy to set up additional environments. To reach the devel- oper community, whose efforts aren’t always funded, the product should be free or inexpensive. EXPLAINING THE SCORES To see the relative positioning of the seven ven- dors, see Illustration 2. Microsoft and Macromedia Hit the Bull’s-Eye Microsoft’s .NET Framework and Macromedia’s JRun and ColdFusion MX hit the Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s-Eye. Of the two, Microsoft gets higher marks for the ease of creating Web Services from a range of components. Macromedia scores slightly higher for the ease of installing the Web Services Deployment Environment. Oracle and Systinet Achieve a 2 Oracle Oracle9iAS and Systinet WASP are close on the heels of Macromedia and Microsoft. Ora- cle9iAS outscores WASP due to its support for stored procedures as Web Services; WASP beats Oracle9iAS for installability and ease of use. 4 • Hitting the Exploratory Web Services Bull’s-Eye © 2002 Patricia Seybold Group IBM and BEA Achieve a 3 IBM WebSphere V5 and BEA WebLogic Server Version 7.0 are fabulous platforms. However, IBM misses the center of the Bull’s-Eye because of the intricacy of setting up and administering Web- Sphere. BEA misses the center of the Bull’s-Eye because it supports relatively fewer types of compo- nents deployed as Web Services. Sun Achieves a 4 This score is open to some philosophical argu- ment. Because Sun is a stickler for standards, Sun ONE Application Server offers fewer of the produc- tivity-enhancing, but generally proprietary, features. That is very good for customers who insist on port- ability. In the end, however, because this is an ex- ploratory phase and not necessarily producing pro- duction systems, we opted for productivity enhanc- ing features at the expense of portability. You may feel differently. In addition, Sun’s handling of cus- tom data types and custom message handling is less straightforward than the other solutions listed here. THE BOTTOM LINE All of the products we reviewed are acceptable platforms for the exploratory phase of your Web Services journey. Web Services Deployment Environments for Exploratory Phase (August 2002) Microsoft Macromedia Systinet Sun BEA IBM Oracle © August 2002 Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Illustration 2. Which Web Services Deployment Environment does the best job of supporting the exploratory phase of your Web Services journey? Microsoft and Macromedia hit the Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s-Eye. Patricia Seybold Group Bull’s-Eye • 5 © 2002 Patricia Seybold Group Previously-published Web Services Deployment Re- ports: • Microsoft .NET Framework Web Services Deploy- ment Environment (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/6/PR6- 27-02CC/PR6-27-02CC.asp) • Macromedia’s Web Services Deployment Solutions (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/5/PR5- 24-02CC/PR5-24-02CC.asp) • Oracle9iAS Web Services Deployment Environment (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/8/PR8- 1-02CC/PR8-1-02CC.asp) • Systinet Web-Services Deployment: WASP Server for Java (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/4/PR4- 11-02CC/PR4-11-02CC.asp) • IBM WebSphere Application Server V5 Web Ser- vices Deployment Environment (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/6/PR6- 15-02CC/PR6-15-02CC.asp) • BEA WebLogic Web Services Deployment Envi- ronment (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/7/PR7- 11-02CC/PR7-11-02CC.asp) • Sun ONE Web Services Deployment Environment (http://www.psgroup.com/doc/products/2002/8/PR8- 22-02CC/PR8-22-02CC.asp)