B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

Web Services 329
The solution: A SOA-based framework can enable companies in
achieving their B2Bi goals by providing a service-based platform to
integrate new and existing applications and systems, implementing
industry standards, and building an infrastructure that would support the
dynamic messaging required for continuous processing for all types of
business transactions. Service-oriented architecture can provide the
foundation and Web services can provide the building blocks for
application architecture in order to achieve seamless trade processing.
A SOA-based framework is capable of providing support for multiple
XML standards, such as ISO15022, cXML, and FpML, at the same time,
and adding additional standards support without significant redevelopment
effort. With the use of Web services as an enabling technology, B2Bi
related problems and issues will shift from connectivity among different
applications in-house and with trading partner applications to the content
and structure of the information that is exchanged. The analogy here
will be that Web services will define the standard postal mechanism
along with the envelope and addressing format for exchanging letters.
What is inside the envelope (the content of the letter) will be defined
by the XML-based business process standard, such as ISO 15022 XML
or RosettaNet.
11.3. Essential Features of a Web Services
Environment
There are several essential features for the operation of Web services.
The Web services environment provides a framework that gives the
ability to dynamically discover, install and re-use business services.
A Web service needs to be:
• Created and its interfaces and invocation methods must be defined;
• Published to one or more intranet or Internet repositories for potential
users to locate;
• Located to be invoked by potential users;
• Invoked by other Web services, applications;
• Provide access to standard library functions such as security, search,
translation, logging and transactions;