Welcome!

Ron Ben-Natan

Subscribe to Ron Ben-Natan: eMailAlertsEmail Alerts
Get Ron Ben-Natan via: homepageHomepage mobileMobile rssRSS facebookFacebook twitterTwitter linkedinLinkedIn


Top Stories by Ron Ben-Natan

In the past decade "workflow" has become one of the most overloaded terms in the software industry. Almost every application is tagged as "based on workflow." While this doesn't always mean a lot, there is good reason for it; it involves recognition among software architects that the business process is the application. With the advent of Web services, workflow vendors and enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors are aligning themselves and often reinventing themselves to make full use of Web services and the inherent strengths of the asynchronous, loosely coupled software model. While Web services are powerful in and of themselves, the combination of Web services with a process-based approach is even stronger. This marriage of workflow with Web services is often termed Web services orchestration. Orchestration is a relatively new term, but it's already bein... (more)

The Brave New World of Web Services

The shift to e-business is fundamentally changing how systems look - and even more important (for us developers) - how systems are built. To support e-business, systems often evolve "from the outside in" - in the sense that a Web site is put up quickly, and it reaches back slowly into the corporation's back-end systems. The other focus of e-business is the interconnections with partners' systems - sometimes within the enterprise and sometimes outside the enterprise. In today's e-business strategy the concept of "e-bonding" is no longer far-fetched. E-bonding in this context is th... (more)

XML Glue: An XML workflow and integration layer for telecommunication providers

There are a number of skeletons in the closets of today's telecommunication service providers. One of the scariest is that most service providers cannot successfully deliver on the promises they make as service-level commitments to their customers. Not do not or will not. Cannot. For many reasons, successful service-level management in the competitive telecom arena remains a theory - full of unfulfilled potential and many broken promises. The OSS When I was younger I had a sign on my monitor that read "to err is human; to really make a mess requires a computer." This is a bit misl... (more)

XML Computation Trees

Every computer science undergraduate program in the world has two important foundation courses: data structures and algorithms. Open any book on these subjects and you'll see immediately that almost a third of it is devoted to graphs. Graphs are used to model a very large number of real-world problems: the traveling salesman problem, efficient routing of a package, network flows, and more - all are modeled as graphs and often solved by graph-based algorithms. A common use of a graph-based representation is that of a computation graph. Simply put, it's a graph that models a set o... (more)

Developing Web Services with WebSphere Studio

In my last article (WSDJ, Vol. 1, issue 4) I showed you how to use WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) to develop and publish a Web service. You saw how to use the Web services wizard to wrap an existing Java method as a Web service and expose the metadata required for invoking the service. You also saw how the UDDI Explorer is used to publish your service on a public registry so others can find and use it. This month's focus is on discovering the service and building a client that invokes the Web service. You'll learn more about how WSAD hides the complexity and mechan... (more)