News

Web services and composite apps

• By Rich Seeley
• April 23, 2003

The theory of Composite Application Development is becoming a reality thanks to Web services and related XML standards for interoperability, according to Alex Andrianopoulos, vice president, SeeBeyond Technology Corp., (http://www.seebeyond.com) Monrovia, Calif.

Composite applications, as defined by analyst Tom Dwyer of The Aberdeen Group's middleware and integration technology group, "are new applications or business solutions created by combining existing functionality ... accomplished with products such as integration middleware."

"The concept of composite application development appeared in the marketplace a couple of years ago," SeeBeyond's Andrianopoulos explains. "But in all honesty, this concept, as such, did not gain a lot of traction because the appropriate infrastructure was not in place. There were some prerequisites from SeeBeyond's perspective that were necessary for composite application development to become a reality. Those prerequisites are now in place."

Web services and other XML standards for business processes are listed by Andrianopoulos as the keys to making composite application development a reality. SeeBeyond is a member of both the W3C and OASIS efforts to develop and enhance XML Web services standards, he added.

This spring, SeeBeyond is introducing a series of tools that will make up its Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) Suite v5.0 for developing composite applications.

Andrianopoulos said the suite is designed to provide developers with a "scalable and open platform for developing, executing and managing end-to-end integrated processes and end-user composite applications."