Web Services Enabled Application Integration In E-Business Environment

Electronic Business is a trend of developing enterprises' management style. By participating in Electronic Business, enterprises can streamline the cooperation with their partners, and increase their competitive advantages in the global market. With more and more enterprises joining Electronic Business, the integration of heterogeneous electronic business systems has become a major concern for both managers and technical personnel. In this paper, we study the integration of the electronic business applications by using Web Services—a new generation platform of designing the distributed application. First, we introduce the current research situation and the architecture of Electronic Business. In particular, we analyze the development of various electronic business levels, the concept of Dynamic e-Business, and the significance of Dynamic e-Business. Second, the Web Service technology framework is discussed in detail, including the Web Service definition, the Web Service composing, and the Web Service architecture model. Third, three development technologies of distributed application are introduced, namely, CORBA, COM／DCOM, and Java RMI. Based on the analysis of the problems in these distributed application technologies, we propose that Web Services is used to construct effective distributed applications. A case study is also presented to illustrate how to use Web Services to encapsulate different systems and implement the integration among different systems on web. This case demonstrates the process to define Web Services API, construct WSDL, and set up UDDI registry. In the end, we discuss the existing problems and the development trends in Web Services.