Reusable components closer to reality

Web services combined with proposed Java standards could realise the long-held vision of high-speed application assembly from a library of reusable components.

A major initiative discussed at this month's BEA eWorld 2003 conference was BEA's Java web services (JWS) controls development, to be submitted as a proposed Java standard.

But analysts expressed reservations, citing component ownership and the inherent simplicity of web services as weaknesses.

However, JWS controls are already deployed in BEA's WebLogic Workshop 8.1 development environment.

"Up to now J2EE technology meant that you needed a deep development environment to do componentisation. After WebLogic 8.1 there will be much more," said Olivier Helleboid, president of BEA products.

"BEA's vision is to continue along the path to business applications that hide the complexity of enterprise systems."

But Gary Barnett, principal analyst at Ovum Holway, cautioned: "It's a bad idea to build a system on a genuinely distributed basis.

"The more external components over which you have no control, the more brittle and unstable the system becomes."

JWS controls produce Java components far more easily than is possible with enterprise Java beans.

The approach mimics Microsoft's well-established ActiveX controls for assembling Windows application components.

BEA has signed a partnership agreement with ComponentSource, a company specialising in off-the-shelf components, which has a library of some 10,000 components, 9,000 of which run on Windows or .Net.

"JWS controls open J2EE to the masses," explained Sam Paterson, chief executive at ComponentSource. "It takes a lot of work out of programmers' hands and creating [JWS] controls is very simple."

The company is working closely with BEA but also partners with IBM. Paterson said that the JWS components would run in all J2EE environments after ratification.

But before web services is used to assemble applications across firewalls, standards such as security need to reach completion.

Ashim Pal, programme director for international web and collaboration strategies at Meta Group, said: "The model is real. But initially it will be pretty coarse grained, taking large applications and wrapping them.

"Over a very long time we will see applications being re-architectured as components."

However, Barnett warned of a more fundamental problem. "Web services' virtue is its simplicity," he said.

"But is it too simple to be worth using? Running 1,000 enterprise resource planning components over the internet is an incredibly complex beast."

The original idea behind object-oriented programming, which has never been realised, was to create thousands of self-contained 'objects' of reusable code which could be assembled to create applications very quickly.