Example research essay topic: Hong Kong Business Processes - 1,949 words

NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote

Web Services. Web Services are not implemented in a monolithic way, but rather represent a collection of several related technologies. A new language was developed in the Internet back in 1999. What were the reasons for that? The old one was called HTML, and it was a gear for the whole internet, especially for the area called World Wide Web, development process. Now the Web outgrew its creator and the need for further development became obvious, because Web needed features that are not in HTML.

HTML was able to handle the main tasks of information flows but in somewhat fixed way. But the development of the Web set new goals that needed the splitting of the data and different representation of it, in order to have a necessary solution for such an improvement. Therefore a new language called XML was developed. XML is considered to be one of the greatest developments of Web technology. This is Extensible Markup Language.

The languages were mainly developed for software developers that use Java script and C++ programming techniques. The development of this new language gave a way for the development of newer and different languages such as: Web Services Flow Language (WSFL), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). These languages will be the main concern of this research. We are going to investigate the development process of it and try to see the perspective for its further development and improvement.

Taking into account the fact that future success of e-commerce and Web services depends on interoperability between different vendors products, the World Wide Web Consortium (W 3 C) attempted to fill in some of the gaps in the current array of standards back in 2001. There was a meeting at Hong Kong back in 2001, where the main issues of WWW were discussed and resolved. The W 3 Cs painstaking standards work was critical for enabling companies to use the Web for commerce, according to Roger Cutler, a senior staff research scientist at the Chevron Information Technology division of Chevron U. S. A. and a member of the W 3 C for the past year.

Theres a tremendous amount of money thats projected to flow through [Web services], Cutler says. Were just concerned that the infrastructure for them is standards-based. Nonstandard technology is usually more expensive to buy and implement, and it is harder to make it work over time, he said. (Article) With this in mind, IBM revealed it was preparing to propose to the W 3 C a new standard dubbed the WSFL (Web Services Flow Language). WSFL was designed to describe how a series of functions would work in providing Web services, according to Robert Sutor, director of e-business standards strategy at IBM in Somers, N.

Y. It would help developers and corporate users specify the many pieces they need to plug into workflow applications or business processes and the sequence in which they should operate, he said. For example, WSFL might include a way to describe how well a service, such as a transaction engine, should perform. That would enable a Web services provider to guarantee QoS (quality of service), according to Sutor. Trying to convince the industry to agree on such workflow standards has been a common problem over the years, Sutor said, acknowledging that other initiatives compete with the WSFL, including ones from the Workflow Management Coalition and the Business Process Management Initiative. But Sutor sensed a growing desire among many to consolidate the various proposals and technologies into one, and adds that he doesnt see why intelligent compromises cant be made. [WSFL] is not something we are trying to force down peoples throats as the de facto standard.

We think it has a lot of good ideas in it that are very consistent with some of the other Web services standards people are working on, Sutor said. Sutor was pretty confident that the W 3 C will get a Web Services workflow group charted by years end, which can bring a number of proposals together into a single, cohesive standard. The W 3 C event was also the venue for the announcement that the XML Schema had been elevated to a W 3 C recommendation, the final stage for a W 3 C standard. The XML Schema defines how programmers should describe content using XML, which can put an identifying tag on any piece of content on the Web.

The new rules should have paved the way for standardized, relatively low-cost applications for describing and managing online data, says Lane Leskela, a Hong Kong-based analyst at consulting company Gartner. Until than, most programmers had described Web content using DTDs (Document Type Definitions), which could vary among different applications and industries. (Article) The XML Schema was good news for small and midsize companies and enterprises that were not using EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), a specialized system mostly used by large enterprises, Leskela says. Until than, there had been conflicting standards for communicating over the Web about products and transactions. Back in 2001, SMEs [small to medium enterprises] can find their feet in terms of approaching the ability to do that at a global, standard level, Leskela said.

Another promising idea that came out of the meeting was intended to help companies get timely information out to customers in a more reliable way. Keith Ramamritham, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, presented a paper on ways to alternately use push and pull techniques as network conditions allow. Some clients might call the server to request an update whereas others would have the data pushed to them automatically. Ramamrithams PAP (Push and Pull) and POP (Push or Pull) protocols have algorithms for automatically making those choices.

Part of enabling companies to implement new e-commerce systems was giving them confidence that those systems actually comply with standards and could interoperate with technology that a partner or customer used. At the Hong Kong meeting back in 2001, W 3 C members formally proposed that the group look into creating test suites and other materials so vendors could make sure their products comply with W 3 C standards, according to Janet Daley, head of communications at the W 3 C. The new language was created to help programmers and managers of enterprises solve their current issues. Just simple text messages, readable and writable by people and computers, live at the core of every successful Internet application. XML seeks to grow the expressive power of these texts while preserving their accessibility. Java, although born to the Internet, has been oddly slow to embrace these structures.

For example, regular expressions are the most basic tool for working with patterned text. Yet only now, in the JDK (Java Development Kit) 1. 4 release, do regular expressions become a standard feature of the Java platform. Likewise, basic XML facilities such as parsing with SAX (Simple API for XML) and DOM (Document Object Model) interfaces, and transformation with XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Transformation) - although long available from other sources- make their first official debut in J 2 SE (Java 2 Standard Edition) 1. 4. Although Suns Java/XML engine may have started slowly, its really cranking now. A set of unbundled XML and Web-services APIs, in various stages of development, seeks to complement the XML core thats built into the platform.

These JAX Pack APIs define a Java framework within which developers can perform several tasks, including the following: Translate between XML documents and native Java objects; Use tightly-coupled RPC-style (Remote Procedure Call) Web services; Use document-style Web services that communicate in more loosely coupled ways; Locate Web services using UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) or ebXML (e-business XML). All this information definitely becomes pretty thick to understand it. This was all designed for people who have the necessary background in these issues. To cut through the fog of acronyms, Sun offers the mantra: Portable code, portable data. Thats helpful, but theres no avoiding the fact that the simplicity of the early Internet is just a memory. We now expect the Internet to do everything that proprietary enterprise systems once did and more.

The result is a welter of initiatives that no single platform can hope to nail down in a single iteration. Suns strategy, as the next-generation Web bootstraps itself into existence, is to adapt Java as flexibly as it can to an ecosystem in rapid evolution. Now we will have a quick tour to the reasons of APIs. First of all we are going to define the core features of Suns emerging Web services model.

For Hal Stern, CTO of i Planets software division, there are three core activities: creating service endpoints, assembling services into business processes, and deploying these in ways that administrators can control and users can comprehend. We tend to lump all these things together, Stern says, without realizing that requirements in one domain may affect another. For example, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) messages can easily be encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), but what is the security context in which such messages are exchanged? Tacitly or explicitly, it is defined by existing networks, applications, and business processes. These are diverse within companies, and even more so across them. Trying to go little bit deeper into the Web services, we find the charter of ebXML, one of the messaging profiles supported by JAXM (Java API for XML Messaging). (Another JAXM profile is WS-Routing, formerly SOAP-RP. ) But business- collaboration protocols such as ebXML will not soon, and may never, solve the kinds of semantic problems that plague systems integrators who regularly struggle with the need to match one companys definition of supplier, customer, or purchase order to another's.

Youre not going to change SAPs or Siebels notion of a user, Stern says. What you can and must do is map between these representations. No matter what style of XML messaging is used to connect them, the fact that it is XML guarantees that you can create that mapping. We have to note that although Suns portable data slogan implies Java-to-non- Java interoperability, that isnt the only reason to use XML with Java. Application semantics ride on top of platforms and languages. Even in an all-Java environment, XML creates common ground on which to wrestle with those semantics.

Were this not so, JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding), which translates between Java classes and XML documents, might seem useful only for communicating with the non-Java world. After all, Java has always natively supported the serialization of objects to and from a binary format. But Java doesnt natively support the transformation of objects, and it is nicely complemented by XML in this regard. Consequently we see the wide horizon for the development of the Web services and various code languages.

XML started long ago and now it is being developed and improved constantly. First-generation Web services recapitulate a theme weve all seen before: Issue a remote function call, receive a package of data in response. As industry veterans like to say, just insert your favorite RPC protocol. Whether you use Javas RMI (Remote Method Invocation) or XML-RPC or SOAP, its all the same kind of thing.

When the calls and responses are written in XML, however, theyre open to easy inspection and manipulation. Of course, XML also underpins the language and platform neutrality that is the hallmark of Web services. The Web services stack- SOAP, WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and UDDI- aims to make the dream of cross-language and cross-platform interoperability come true. That dream hasnt quite come true yet, despite much encouraging progress. One reason is Xml's transition from the DTD (Document Type Definition) as a way of defining data types, ...

Research essay sample on Hong Kong Business Processes