That meant knowing
in detail which technology was used for developing all the
software entities; which technology was used for exposing those
entities on the network; and ?¬?nally, all the painstaking details
about the speci?¬?c functions performed, the exact parameters
exchanged, and their expected formats. The task was usually
eased by using one single platform because doing so greatly
reduced the number of variables coming into play. Component
hosting systems such as COM+ and Java EJB emerged, and network
middleware such as CORBA and again COM+ offered
services for handling software communications. However, the
results were often brittle. The tight coupling between software
components (i.e., between who provided a function and who
consumed it) made the systems extremely susceptible to
changes and dif?¬?cult to maintain. Cross-platform communica-
Before web services,
interoperability
had to be
planned all the way
down to painstakingly
?¬?ne details
WS-* Web Services Speci?¬?cations: The Rei?¬?cation of the Identity Metasystem 139
tion was also challenging and painstakingly achieved by ad hoc
integration components and expensive bridges.
As the IT world grew in importance and ubiquity, it became
clear that those systems could not cope with the strain of increasingly
diverse software environments coming from mergers
and acquisitions, the need for integrating different software
packages, and the dissolution of the boundaries between company
information silos.
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