Web services, SOA & delivery of government services

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[Tim Bray is important in the XML world and is worth listening to.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/11/ReachPSB
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/04/01/WS-Mumble

Thanks to Darcy Quesnel for this pointer. Some excerpts  -BSA]


People have asked why, since I joined Sun, I've been going on about WS-this
and WS-that. I had an eye-opening experience that changed how I think about
Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Services. I think that the future is
in plain sight, and that's because it's being built right now by the
Government of Ireland, and it's called reachservices.

Reach is an agency of the Irish government concerned generally with
government services to people and organizations, and specifically with
E-Government. They are building reachservices, a large piece of E-Government
portal and integration infrastructure. 

At that time, the project was known as the PSB, for "Public Services
Broker;" its design documentation is on-line. I advise anyone who cares
about the future of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures to
invest some time in reading those documents. 

They are hundreds of pages in length and defy summarization, but a few
bullet points will give a flavor.

Design Basis The PSB is:

based on asynchronous message-passing: the basic software interfaces are
"inject a message" and "receive a message". There are no RPC semantics
anywhere, so it ought to scale.

XML-centric; Reach have defined their own simple XML envelope to aid in
identifying services and routing requests to them. If you can send and
receive these messages, you can work with the system.

platform-agnostic; the exchange of XML messages between the system and the
outside world can be accomplished with XML over HTTP (or even SMTP), with
Microsoft BizTalk, with WSDL and SOAP, or via Java JMS calls. This means
that an agency of the Irish government that wants to use it isn't forced
into any particular vendor's arms. The customer is highly focused on not
getting locked into any technology or platform.

highly secure. There is all sorts of legislation that controls what may and
may not be done with information about the citizens and businesses of
Ireland. I was immensely impressed with the thinking on the security
architecture.

highly accountable; this is related to but distinct from security. That is
to say, all transactions that cross the integration framework must be
reliably logged and that log reliably preserved.

Lessons reachservices is a good example of what the SOA deployments of the
future will look like. I think that if there are any protocols,
technologies, or standards that turn out not to be necessary for this
project, then maybe they're not that necessary at all. This is important
stuff.



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