Speaking to eWeeks Corporate Partner advisory board in New York in late March, WebSphere Platform Chief Architect and IBM Fellow Donald Ferguson described an all-encompassing role for Web services in the WebSphere product line.
“Our model is that Web services are a universal mechanism for program-to-program interaction,” said Ferguson, describing how IBM was enabling decidedly non-Web development platforms such as CICS and COBOL to be accessed through Web service interfaces.
IBMs long-term vision is to allow customers to create large applications on almost an ad hoc basis from an interconnected mesh of Web services. WebSphere Studio Application Developer 4.1, which shipped last month, includes tools to visually assemble a group of Web services into a meta-Web service.
