Eric Pulier

Who doesn't love the service-oriented architecture (SOA)? You get efficiency in your application development, revolutionary ability to interoperate with partners and suppliers, and mastery over change management that was never before possible. With the technologies available today to take advantage of SOAs in enterprise settings, organizations can quickly find themselves faced with many concurrent decisions and implementations. Your staff is exposing legacy applications as Web services in Visual Studio .NET and JBuilder. Partners are clamoring for access to your systems using Web services. Your boss wants to connect the company to key customers using Web services. No problem? Big problem: security. SOA security is the two-ton elephant stomping through the data center. According to ZapThink, "Security is the immediate roadblock facing widespread implementation of W... (more)

The Reality, Challenges, and Enormous Potential of Web Services

Web services certainly have the potential to improve and simplify the process of enterprise application integration (EAI). By establishing a nonproprietary, universally accepted standard of communication between applications, Web services can succeed where other approaches have struggled. With Web services, organizations can integrate key applications without relying on costly, time-consuming, proprietary, and maintenance-intensive solutions. That said, Web services alone are not in and of themselves a complete integration platform, but rather merely the enabling standards. As a ... (more)