Page 236 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Web Technologies-II

Notes a web server (ASP.NET) and two programming languages (VisualBasic.NET and C#.NET) that
compete against PHP and Java respectively. They also have a database (SQL Server). Microsoft
has done an excellent job making their products easy to use so a business analyst can create a
web application without needing a programmer.
Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix
scripting language to make report processing easier. Perl gained widespread
popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in part due to its
parsing abilities.

SMS: Case Study of a Web Services Deployment

ucin PLC is a small software consultancy headquarterd in Newport, Wales, in the
United Kingdom. Mike Clark is its founder and managing director. It has specialized
Lin transaction-oriented client-server applications for over a decade. In February 2001,
three engineers began work on a small demonstration of a web services-to-SMS gateway. A
few weeks later, in March, it opened the service to the public.

“Short Messaging Service” or “Short Message Sending” is widely supported in wireless
telephones in most European and Asia-Pacific countries, although rarely in the USA. Wildly
popular in Japan and elsewhere, SMS allows telephone users to compose short textual
messages using the telephone handset, and transmit them asynchronously. Think of it as
instant messaging for cellphones.

It is natural to bind together the pertinent telephony and computing protocols so that
computers can originate and perhaps receive such messages. That is Lucin's achievement
in its web services-to-SMS gateway; it is the first of several such for-fee gateways it plans
for the months ahead:
• Web service to pager

• Web service to fax
• Web service to speech

• Web Service to TAPI (telephony application programming interface)
In Lucin's plan, it will be only a short time, probably the final quarter of 2001, before it
has the capability to dial a conventional telephone, and read out an arbitrary message in a
synthesized voice.

The starting point, though, is the integration of web services and SMS.
Construction of a Web Service

The SMS gateway is a small software project. Much of the media publicity around web
services envisions integrating enterprise applications on large supply chain projects. Clark
insists that this misses the point of the “instant gratification services” already moving into
production for modest, well-specified projects. He deliberately chose SMS as a model. As
Clark indicates, “[SMS] fits this [model] perfectly as a web service that's great to use,” but
can afford occasional outages or downtime.

Current infrastructure enforces this kind of tolerance. Networks simply are not 100% reliable
or ubiquitous yet.
Contd...

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