Adam Bosworth, BEA Systems: Asynchronous Web services

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Building on his experience as chief architect of XML at Microsoft, co-founder of CrossGain, and now vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, Bosworth is setting up a framework to describe Web services and push them to the next level.

BEA's WebLogic Workshop, previously known as Cajun, presents an application development framework, toolset, and run time that is loosely coupled -- allowing for easier Web services deployment and integration -- and supports both synchronous and asynchronous Web services. Bosworth believes that most Web services for b-to-b work will need at least some degree of asynchronous communication to deal with Web services requests that do not necessarily need immediate attention.

Asynchronous functionality is especially important to long-running processes such as customer queries, reverse auctions, or product-status notifications and to the accessibility and reliability of Web services. Bosworth is still waiting for the right Web services reliability and security standards to bring Web services completely into the b-to-b world.

Troy Dixler, Allegro Networks: Multirouter technology/routing as a service

Dixler is looking to give carriers a way out of their inefficient rack-and-stack router configurations for scaling IP networks by offering Allegro's multiple routing devices in a single box.

Putting these multirouter boxes at various locations will give carriers the chance to sell routing as part of their system: Companies will be able to buy routing services from the same source as their bandwidth, expanding their networks faster and more easily, says Dixler. The "technical ramifications of building this kind of system are so deep," he adds, noting that multirouter technology gets to the foundation of Internet connectivity, which is "almost a utility at this point -- people rely on e-mail like they rely on a dial tone."

"There are going to be a lot more 'multidevices' [in the future]: multiservers, multifirewalls, multirouters," says Dixler. "The last-mile problem is not going to be solved overnight. ... This is where all routers are going to go. It just doesn't make sense to build them the way they have been. I'd love to look back 10 years and say, 'Remember when we had racks of routers?' If I can say that in 10 years, then we're making history here."

Ian Foster, Carl Kessleman, and Steve Tuecke, The Globus Project: Grid computing

Begun in 1995, The Globus Project combines open-architecture implementations with the promise of grid computing to "enable the sharing and coordinated use of resources among dynamically formed groups of individuals and institutions -- what we call 'virtual organizations,' " says Foster, one of the project's founding members.

Along with Kessleman and Tuecke, Foster and the rest of The Globus Project team -- about 50 people at Argonne National Laboratory and the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California, plus several others -- are setting up the foundation to unify distributed computing frameworks through standard, open grid protocols and open-source implementations of those protocols.

Currently, Globus is working on integrating grid technology with Web services through the OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture), coordinating data processing across the computing grid to be delivered as Web services. "This work will produce Globus Toolkit 3.0, which we hope will provide an open-source, open-architecture grid technology base for e-business and e-science," explains Foster; this integration work will continue through 2002 and 2003.

Bob Lamoureaux, WorldStreet: FIX protocol

The FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol may be the nearest thing to a standard for the securities industry. The work done by Lamoureaux and the other members of the FIX protocol group on making it relate to the industry's need for better electronic exchange technology has the potential to reach all corners of the global trading process.

As an open messaging standard, FIX focuses on secure, real-time communication of financial information, linking implementers with FIX-enabled software. A markup language, FIXML, is also in the creation stage, aiming to streamline the complex and often numerous FIX application messages across systems. As FIX evolves, though, it remains to be seen how much of the industry will adopt the protocol and continue to push changes as business changes. Still, FIX is likely to play a major role as the securities industry moves toward greater automation.

The UDDI team: Toufic Boubez (Microsoft), Maryann Hondo (IBM), Chris Kurt (Microsoft), Jared Rodriguez (Ariba), and Daniel Rogers (Microsoft): Web services development

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) wants to become the business yellow pages of Web services -- a way for companies to find and select the services and contacts they need to do business.

Using XML, HTTP, and DNS, UDDI seeks to give software a way to automatically discover services and integrate them, along with any required translation; UDDI functionality would be written into software and lean on a network of UDDI servers for the catalog of services and information available on Web sites, with access provided by SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

Although it first emerged as an open draft in September 2002, co-authored by employees of Microsoft, IBM, and Ariba, those who crafted and those who currently work with UDDI expect to eventually submit UDDI to a standards body after completing two more versions of the spec. But, as with WSDL (Web Services Description Language), the big question for these Web services specifications is how they will work together -- or work separately -- as Web services continue to evolve.

The WSDL team: Erik Christensen (Microsoft), Francisco Curbera (IBM), Greg Meredith (Microsoft), and Sanjiva Weerawarana (IBM): Web services development

WSDL could be considered a Web services tracking mechanism: It is intended to keep tabs on what a service does and how and where it can be accessed and implemented.

Submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in March 2001, Version 1.1 of the language is "an XML format for describing network services as a set of end points operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an end point. Related concrete end points are combined into abstract end points [services]," according to the W3C note. Concerns about WSDL's flexibility and complexity and its relationship with other Web services standards are still being debated, but the next step in WSDL's development hinges first on the creation of a WSDL working group, which may be coming about through the W3C's Web Services Activity and its coordination and working groups.

Return to our 2002 Innovators package.