Summary

A recent study discovered that, of companies experiencing a "major loss" of computer records, 43 percent never reopened, 51 percent closed within two years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent survived over the long-term[1] For small and medium-sized businesses (SMB's) in particular, these statistics suggest the necessity of crafting a Business Continuity Planning (BCP) strategy grounded in a robust data backup and recovery solution.

 What is XML?

"XML is the closest thing to a universal data language for software systems. HTML (for the web) is a type of XML. All significant SQL databases have XML input/output features. Web Services, and now AJAX and Web 2.0, use XML. XML capabilities should be a part of any software investment."

 What Can Web 2.0 Do for Me? What is a Thin Client?

"Employees enjoy having secure access to documents, reports, real-time business information, and management tools in their browser. Portals work with the latest web and data standards to deliver useable, flexible and inexpensive software applications, to large groups of people in diverse locations. New applications require no deployment costs and little training." 

The Linux/Apache Model

Linux/Apache as a platform has been doing web-based networking, backed by large-scale community development, for a long time. The most mature SPAM filters , email handlers, RSS tools, web data-miners, and web automation tools are Linux/Apache based. For those tasks, that's what we may recommend. These services or components can be integrated easily with Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft servers and systems.

Are we talking about “Open Systems” or “Open Software”?

No. We’re really trying to discuss the important business move toward open architectures. Enterprise or service architecture is not related to “open systems” or “open software”. For open systems, think “UNIX-like systems which have been standardized”. For open software, think free Linux software, free licensing, and community development.

Is Linux more “open” for business software architectures?

No. What matters are your software applications, not your systems. Linux is important, however, because most of the web runs on Apache web servers running on Linux, and the internet (worldwide) and intranet (corporate) ARE vital to open architectures.

Written by Keith Mitchell, Senior Developer at NSKinc

Open Architecture and Services

Service oriented architecture is a design of business systems where applications which store, manipulate, or use data, provide a mechanism or service to other applications in the system, for getting at that same data.

An open architecture is a business system where applications “expose” what they do, and the data they use, to other applications or network services.

Web Services started a lot of things (moderately well). A web service is a web page that another computer can go to, to get information. It’s that simple. By the time web services were popular in certain functions (weather info, product vending by middleware and B2B, and stock quotes), they had been very standardized and defined. That standard was clumsy to implement and was sometimes too slow for the speed of business. Much work went into creating lightweight wrappers for the data which was given out by web services, so that they would be fast. SOAP is a very lightweight data container for web services data.

What’s good about SOAP and web services? Data wrapped in a SOAP wrapper can move like a text file across networks, through firewalls, from a Windows machine into a Linux machine into a Mac, and then into a library mainframe. Data can be easily taken from one database and added into another, or made into a report. This was revolutionary several years ago. Web services tell other computers what they do (what “service” they provide) and what data to expect. However, the expected explosion of computer-consumed data didn’t happen with web services, except in some e-commerce and distributed corporate environments.

Why not? New and better ways are always being created for software systems to become more open. This is a very important benefit to corporate software customers because new functionality can be added inexpensively, Have you noticed how quickly RSS newsfeeds became widespread? Compared to SOAP web services, RSS is very fast and easy to work with. Similarly, AJAX, without any SOAP wrappers at all, has been used to replace web services. RSS and AJAX are not just “Web 2.0”. They could be referred to as “Web Services 2.0”, as well.

Written by Keith Mitchell, Senior Developer at NSKinc