Page 1 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Web Service User Interface (WSUI) Language Dean Moses Chad Williams Chief Architect Product Manager WSCM Technical Committee - January, 2002 EPICENTRIC, INC.

Page 2 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved WSUI - Developing a Standard for User-centered Web Service Interaction Epicentric WSUI Briefing Business Drivers  WSUI Overview  Technical Overview  AGENDA

Page 3 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Web Services and Web Development The Situation:  Current web service technologies are designed for a developer audience and are intended principally for server to server communication  Vendor-specific approaches have emerged to facilitate presentation of web services  In order enable business users to participate in the web service revolution a standard is required to allow directly web services to be embedded into e- business web sites

Page 4 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved XML Web Services  Application to application communication via XML/HTTP protocols (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc.) in order to enable application and data integration.  Pros: Extremely flexible  Cons: Custom development necessary, Not possible for business users to participate in development process Stock Symbol Stock Price Stock Quote Server Web App Server MSFT 70 3/4

Page 5 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Market Pain  Dozens of application delivery platforms  Portal servers, app servers, content servers, etc.  Hundreds of application vendors  ERP, SCM, SFA, KM, Doc mgmt, etc.  Hundreds of web service vendors / ASPs  Hosted , ERP, content, finance, maps, etc.  Thousands of enterprises doing custom application development  Each enterprise has potentially hundreds of custom apps …And no standard way to publish applications as XML web services

Page 6 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Displaying Web Services - Portals All content and application services in the portal are displayed in the form of “embedded components”. Many types of web sites in addition to portals are using component-style display models.

Page 7 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Displaying Web Services – Interaction Flow Web service presentation may involve multi-stage interactions resulting in different web pages (component containers) and views

Page 8 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved WSUI Proposal The Solution:  Develop a standard for coupling web services with presentation and interaction information, allowing them to be directly embedded into e-business web sites. The Technology:  A lightweight, easily implementable protocol for adding presentation and multi-stage interaction to standard SOAP web services by using standard XML technologies such as XSLT The Result:  Business users are enabled to participate in the web service revolution and benefit from the power of web services.

Page 9 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved An Epi-Centric Timeline  Epicentric Portlet API – early 1999  Mechanism for writing in-process portlets  Epicentric Modular Web Services (MWS) protocol – mid 2000  SOAP-based protocol to enable remote Portlets to plug into Epicentric portal platform  WSUI – mid 2001  Epicentric-led consortium to build on vendor-neutral Web services display format  WSCM – late 2001  IBM, HP, Epicentric, etc. join in vendor-neutral OASIS TC; standardize WSUI, WSXL concepts  IBM & Epicentric collaboration a key driver

Page 10 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Why Did Epicentric Create WSUI?  Web services have no standard mechanism for packaging as end-user facing applications  Proprietary approaches:  Don’t enable sharing of applications across web vendor platforms  Increase costs of publishing services to customers  Increase costs of application vendors in supporting multiple web delivery platforms  May be dependant on a single browser platform

Page 11 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved WSUI – Web Services Presentation Standard  Create multi-stage, interactive applications  Publish service on one machine, serve from another to an end-user  Do not change the service interface of the web service  Presentation logic interpreted outside context of actual service logic on remote machine  Allow service business logic to be published to a delivery platform  Enable publishing of applications to other websites

Page 12 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Application Syndication Real-World Scenarios  Content syndication –news, stocks…  ASP applications – , vertical apps…  Ex: integrate hosted CRM functionality into portal installed internal to enterprise  Application vendor provides a single Web services based interface to its application  Plug into multiple web delivery platforms without writing to proprietary APIs  Intra-enterprise application/content syndication  “Publish” an ERP integration web service to multiple departmental Intranet portals

Page 13 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Travel Web Service Scenario  Travel booking Web Service integrated into 3 rd party website

Page 14 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Embedded Services of Travel Scenario  Underlying Web services used by travel booking application  Available Flights – check flights  Flight View – detail data on one flight  Flight Booker – book a particular flight  Airport Lookup – flights from airport  Airline Lookup – flights from airline  Calendar Data – calendar data for booking  All of above potentially can be granular WSDL-described SOAP services published by a travel services aggregator

Page 15 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Multi-View Page Interaction Page P1 Web Service S1 View V1 OK Search: Page P2 Web Service S1 View V2 Search Results: 1. Q1 Profits 2. Press Release 3. Newsletter 4. Sales Report 5. News article Page P3 Web Service S1 View V3 Press Release April 14 - Blah blah blah blah Corporate Home Page Welcome! WSUI supports the concept of multi-view web service “components” that are embeddable into “container” pages and support navigation between views in response to user interactions.

Page 16 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved  A web service “component” consists of 4 functional aspects, each of which can be provided by the “component” container or dynamically provided over the Internet by the web service provider:  Presentation, user interface, and navigation  User preferences and application state  Service data  Application Logic Functional Aspects of Web Service Apps

Page 17 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Using WSUI - Components  The physical assets of a WSUI component are:  An XML file that defines the component  XSL stylesheets for rendering component output  The XML component definition defines "events". One event is the initial event to be invoked when a user navigates to the component

Page 18 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Using WSUI - Flow  End user requests a page from a WSUI-aware website. The website runs the initial event of any WSUI component on the page. The event consists of a simple set of actions defined in XML. This action language is oriented towards invoking web services and processing the results. One of the actions is applying a stylesheet to a set of XML fragments to generate the event's display output  User sees the page generated by the WSUI-aware website. Portions of the page were generated by different WSUI components. Part of those portions may be URLs or form actions that invoke other events on the component

Page 19 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Form-Based Request-Response Page P2 Web Service S1 View V2 Search Results: 1. Q1 Profits 2. Press Release 3. Newsletter Page P1 Web Service S1 View V1 OK Search: Corporate Home Page Welcome! Most interactions (form posts, links, etc.) will result in a standard (non- SOAP) HTTP GET or POST being made to an interaction router implemented within the container web application which will in response craft a SOAP call to the appropriate web service and construct a result page containing the appropriate web service view : SOAP Request SOAP Response Search Engine Web Server MSFT Q1 Profits Press Release Newsletter

Page 20 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Key Points in Relation to WSCM  Implementable with current standards. Uses existing HTML/WML/other markup language browsers. WSUI can be put into use immediately. This may not be a goal of WSCM.  Simple system. Epicentric constructed a reference implementation in less than a week. This may not be a goal of WSCM.  Focus on Display. Spec contains guidelines for the display of HTML and WML: don't use the and tags, etc. Spec contains a specific set of stylesheet classes that can optionally be used when constructing HTML, to give the output the look and feel of the site it's embedded within.  Focus on multi-view interaction. Defines how a multi-view user interaction happens, but does not define any way for a system to control the user interaction within a single view: i.e., when a user mouses over something, that info isn't sent back to the server.

Page 21 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved WSUI & UDDI Directories UDDI Directory PUBLISH Portal Installation Web Service Providers SEARCH USE DISCOVER INTEGRATE

Page 22 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved Potential Industry Benefits  Single component display standard – app vendors write to one standard to plug into portals  WSCM TC is now the vehicle for WSUI  App vendors implement in any language, expose services over HTTP as XML/SOAP  Prevent approaches tied to any one client-side technology  Bring flexibility of Web Services model to user- facing apps  Standardize the display tier of Web Services – currently not addressed

Page 23 © 2001, Epicentric - All Rights Reserved THANK YOU © 2001 Epicentric Inc. All rights reserved. Epicentric, Epicentric Portal Server and the “e” logo are trademarks of Epicentric Inc. Other products and companies referred to herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or mark holders. All materials contained herein are the property of each respective company identified on such materials, and may only be used, copied or distributed with the express written permission of each respective company.