Our approach to Web services

Web service's are a compelling implementation of a service oriented architecture. A Web service based architecture will by definition consist of loosely coupled components which will interoperate by passing open XML files between one another. In short, a Web service is just a Component at the end of a http protocol which passes and returns data in an XML format. Therfore, a Web service development approach is just a particular instance of Component Based Development (CBD).

By adopting the WS-I Web service standards and implementing them across our range of J2EE, J2SE, .NET and Delphi Component suites will enable us to offer the greatest flexibility in terms of combining server and client side technologies from different development platforms within there deployment envoiroment. That is, any Web service enabled client application can access the functionality contained within a deployed Web service enabled business component. For example, you may choose to deploy a Web service enabled server side J2EE Application and access this functionality from a client side .NET Windows Form.

Our use of Web services standards is a complementary technology which ties in with our aim of allowing users of our components the greatest flexibility in terms of deployment environment and development tools. In fact, with Web services we can take this aim one step further by allowing multi-platform and multi-language support within the same application.

Fig: Web services allow interoperability between all WS-I enabled platforms

Within the above figure each of the platforms may have software artifacts (i.e. business components, clients, databases, etc) deployed on the server and/or client side. This means that however your divide your deployment environment or development team, for each deployed artifact you will be free to choose the client, server or other technologies from any WS-I compliant software artifact which best suits the needs of your project and development team.