Web Services workarounds

Standards for coordinating and managing Web services are still falling into place. Are there workarounds for organizations that don't want to wait?

The answer is yes, according to industry executives. But the solutions may involve custom coding and may not be completely open. From a security standpoint, Tyson Hartman, director of .NET solutions at Avanade Inc., said his company has built access gateways for some Web services customers to use "as the first line of defense to the open Internet."

The gateway creates an identification/authentication/authorization layer and provides a way to validate messages and log events. He believes the gateway is a workable model "until we get some of these management standards in place." Avanade is a joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture.

As for management, Robert Wegener, director of solutions at consulting firm RCG Information Technology Inc., said organizations can use existing business process management tools to build a management layer on top of Web services.

Hartman said organizations can use Microsoft's BizTalk or more traditional enterprise application integration products to add coordination and transaction capabilities to Web services. BizTalk, for example, has a .NET Toolkit that facilitates distributed transactions.