Java beans gives S&P leg up on Web services

Using WebGain's VisualCafé to develop Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) for the past two years has positioned Standard & Poor's to move quickly into the Web services business. Until now, the EJB components have been locked in the various Web site packages S&P offers its customers. Soon, those components will be listed separately in a menu of 60 services from which customers can pick and choose.

"Because we've built these from the get-go as components in self-contained Java beans, it's easy for us to break these sites down into the 60 Web services," says Brian Whitehead, vice president and chief technology architect at S&P. "It's not like we have one block of code that's 3 million lines long, and we have to chop it up into 60 pieces."

The EJB components talk to the Oracle databases where S&P's financial content is stored through entity and session beans. "We've done that so we can take full advantage of the [iPlanet] application server," Whitehead says. "VisualCafé automatically binds the beans with the application server."

To turn the EJB components into stand-alone Web services, Whitehead says, they must be "wrapped" in the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP defines how applications communicate with one another on the network, a critical step in deploying on-demand services. Although SOAP is still being defined, developers can use several interim implementations on the market now.

Once a component is meshed with SOAP, it can be advertised in the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) directory. UDDI was created to link businesses with other businesses selling services over the Internet.