Page 238 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Web Technologies-II

Notes
Table 1: Process.xml
<message name= “SendMessageRequest”>
<part name= “PhoneNumber” type= “xsd:string”/>
<part name= “Message” type= “xsd:string”/>
<part name= “SenderName” type= “xsd:string”/>
<part name= “SenderPassKey” type= “xsd:string”/>
</message>

Lucin largely recycled its expertise in Visual Basic and allied technologies for this project.
Clark tells, “the web service is simply a layer to DCOM components.”
The next changes for the gateway, according to Clark, are “to push it as a pay to use service,”
at 4.5 British pennies per call, and to contract with telecomm provisioners for development
of the pager, FAX, and other gateways.

Manageability Conclusions
As a software project, the SMS gateway is small: Under a dozen engineer-weeks went into
its design, implementation, and deployment. Clark is reluctant to offer specifics about the
coding, for competitive reasons. Part of the argument that he does advance publicly, though,
is that web services provides the advantages of component-based software development.
Requirement sets apt for web services often decompose naturally into simple designs to
which even junior coders can contribute.
Other public web services also appear to be small in engineering scope. XMethods.net has a
gateway to PacBell SMS (in the western United States). It has an even simpler public interface
(see Resources), transacting only a single WSDL operation: sendMessage. The most elaborate
public service interface is Lucin's demonstration of a mailing list manager. While this defines
twenty six distinct operations, all the data transacted are of simple types such as string.
So, what is special about web services development? We are all really not sure yet. None of
the companies doing large-scale web services-based development are disclosing much about
their experiences. At small scales, the technology “feels” like other light-duty networking
development. It is a definite advantage that humans can read XML, and that so many tools
are available for its management.
Clark's view is that “The problem in developing web services is not the development cycle,
but trying to create a web service that people will pay for.” With the web itself now starting
its second decade, the basic technologies are quite well understood, but there's still plenty of
dissatisfaction and experiment in getting the right “business model” for human-readable web
sites. That looks to be the biggest challenge for external web services – the fourth category
named in the introduction – as well.
The big change in web services development is likely to come when its “component market”
has matured in the fashion of the OCX or VBX practices. The technology already emphasizes
work with building blocks, and that's likely to intensify as more and more services come
online. One difference, perhaps, will be the influence of open source. While OCX and VBX
had proprietary definitions and components licensed for fee have always dominated that
field, web services are based entirely on public standards, and many of the toolkits for this
technology are open-sourced.
Questions

1. How Lucin PLC prepare the SMS project?
2. What were the challenges fronts of the team?

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