The Integration Frontier<< IBM's Intranet | Main | Search and Discovery in the Post-Cold War Era >> David Schatsky | January 16, 2003, 10:04 AM Web services, or XML Web services as Microsoft calls them, are about making application integration quicker, easier and cheaper. Doesn't sound that exciting, until you reflect that often quantitative improvements (say, cutting integration costs by 50%) can give rise to qualitatively different ways of doing things (say, integrating applications that never would have been integrated because it wasn't cost justified to do so). The new frontier in application integration is application experience integration--tying together the user interfaces of multiple apps so that they work together in a coherent and predictable way. Application experience integration is what is required to realize application compositing, which we're starting to see in a primitive way in some enterprise portals. I'm watching with interest what comes of the Web Services Remote Portal (WSRP) proposal as a platform- and vendor-neutral step in this direction. |
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