With technology standards still in development, web
services can seem like blue-sky technology, at least a year or so
away from being commercially viable. However, while some businesses
are giving web services a wide berth, investment bank JP Morgan has
been working with the technology for the past two
years.
A new generation of development tools from companies such as BEA,
IBM and Microsoft have simplified the process of building web
services, but real-world applications have been pioneered by JP
Morgan in order to provide end-users with access to back-end
systems.
Robert Greig, technical lead for investment bank technology
(equities research) at JP Morgan, needed a system to provide
financial data to research analysts at the bank to run
calculations.
The analysts used Excel running on a mixed NT4.0 and Windows XP
desktop environment. The back-end financial engine was built using
BEA's Weblogic Java-based application server, which runs on a Sun
Solaris server and a Sybase database.
The Weblogic software provided JP Morgan with a calculation engine
and a means of uploading financial data. Greig said, "We needed to
make it easy to communicate between Excel and Weblogic."
With operations in Asia-Pacific, London and New York, Greig was
looking for a simple mechanism that could easily be rolled out to
hundreds of desktops. He decided that the best approach to creating
this connectivity was to use Simple Object Access Protocol, which
was still an emerging technology for web services at the time.
Back in 1991 there were few tools that could cope with linking Soap
to the Enterprise Java Beans components within JP Morgan's Weblogic
server.
As JP Morgan was working on web services prior to Microsoft's
introduction of .net, the links into Excel were created using an
older Microsoft tool, the MS Soap Toolkit.
Having evaluated a number of Soap tools, Greig opted for a tool
called Wasp, from a relatively new web services entrant, Systinet,
for the Weblogic interface.
Wasp is a web services infrastructure platform designed to make it
easy to build, deploy and manage secure web services. It is based
on industry standards such as XML, Soap, WSDL and UDDI and supports
web services implementations such as Microsoft .net
architecture.
This financial application for web services is part of a far wider
publishing suite at JP Morgan which provides a collection of
web-based and desktop applications to manage workflow and content
for the firm's analysts.
What is Soap?
Simple Object Access Protocol provides a way for applications
running on one computer system to communicate with another
application, which may reside in a totally separate system.
It consists of three parts: a framework for describing what is in a
message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules and a
convention for remote procedure calls and responses.
The Soap standard is controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium.
It defines one of the three pillars of web services, the other two
being Universal Description, Discovery and Integration and
Extensible Markup Language.