B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

328 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
of applications, resources, messages and objects that enable applicationto-application
interaction over the Internet. They provide well-defined
interfaces, called contracts, that describe the services provided. Web
services are based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and support
bind, publish and find operations. Each component (network node) can
play any or all roles of a service broker, service requester or service
provider.
Web services enable companies to publish public interfaces of their
business objects and programs so that other companies can search and
find them and interact with these services.
At the core of Web services is the fact that each service encapsulates
the implementation details and publishes a messaging API, so that it
can be used by other services over the network. Web services have
all features of object-oriented systems, such as encapsulation, message
passing, dynamic binding and service description and querying. Through
the dynamic binding of components, which is platform and programming
language-neutral and communications mechanism-independent, they
enable just-in-time integration of applications.
Web services enable full leverage of existing infrastructure and
applications. The existing Web applications (Internet/Intranet) can be
easily converted into Web services, irrespective of the platform or
programming language used to implement these applications. The Gartner
Group predicts that by 2004, 40% of legacy enterprise applications will
be partially or fully service oriented.
Examples of practical use of Web services in the B2B world include:
• A company invoking another company's service to send a purchase
order (PO) over the Internet; and
• A logistics company writing a service which calculates the cost of
shipping goods based on weight, delivery date, etc. that other companies
can use to figure out the cost, based on their shipment details.
11.2.1. Application of SOA-based framework to B2Bi
The requirements: For B2Bi, companies have to use a framework that
provides high-performance, reliable, extensible, scalable, secured and
open standards based communication and messaging.