Web Services

Colin Adam, WebServices.org

Wednesday 31st March 2004, 6:30 pm

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 36 York Place, Edinburgh EH1 3HU (street map)

This talk will present an overview of what Web services are, why they should be taken seriously, how they should be understood by business and developers, the standards, the industry players, and importantly, service management of Web services including reliability, security, scalability, integration and orchestration. The talk will defend Web services against misunderstandings, explicitly those generated from over hype, comparisons with distributed object technologies and RESTful solutions. The talk will also cover the future of web services, recently released specifications, applications and unification with grid computing, the soon to be released Microsoft Longhorn, and what pitfalls lie ahead, including some architectural challenges such as versioning.

About the speaker

Colin is an independent Technical Architect specialising in distributed systems design. Over the last five years Colin has been involved in several flagship XML projects with leading companies within the UK financial services industry such as Standard Life, Royal London Group, Scottish Widows and Direct Line. Projects have ranged from designing XML Portals for online insurance quotes to creating XSLT based pipeline processing for new business applications. Colin also has in-depth knowledge of enterprise architectures and products such as IBM MQ Series, WebSphere. As well as authoring numerous published works, Colin has provided technical training in XML and is a regular speaker at XML conferences. Colin graduated from Edinburgh University with a PhD in Theoretical Physics and most recently, a Masters in Advanced Computer Science.

In year 2000, WebServices.Org was born from Colin's interest in XML, SOAP and the potential of open standards based Service Orientated Architecture. Initially created as a website to publish his own papers and opinion, WebServices.Org soon became an established vendor neutral and respected website tracing the progress of early Web services standards and vendors. Over the past 4 years and having undergone a considerable increase in bandwidth, WebServices.Org has evolved into the recognised homepage of the Web services industry. Colin now performs the duties of a Chief Editor, and has brought to publication over 40 authored papers, including contributions from Eric Newcomer, David Orchard and Alan Kotok.