Proceedings

Track: Large-Scale Architectures, Core Technologies, End-User Applications

Audience Level: Technical view

Time: Thursday, November 17 14:00

Keywords: Application Architecture, Data Interchange, Enterprise Applications, Handheld Device, Interoperability, Java, Mobile, Web Services, WSDL, XML

Abstract:

Two of the hottest technology areas today are web services and mobile computing.

Web services and XML technologies are making it easier to exchange data with your partners, customers, and vendors no matter what platform, operating system, network topology, or application they use. Web services define the cross-platform, transport-independent protocols used to exchange XML messages while XML provides an extensible data representation which is easily parsed, read, and manipulated. Web services increases your data's value by allowing it to be exchanged with a greater number of people.

Mobile computing is taking the world by storm. Mobile devices have outsold PCs 3 to 1 for the last several years, with application-enabled devices outselling all PCs combined for the first time in 2003. This trend is expected to continue and accelerate in the future. An amazing and rapidly growing number of users now carry application-enabled devices in their pockets everywhere they go. The potential to leverage these omni-present, connected devices to easily access and share any data from anywhere via web services is phenomenal. However, there are many challenges that must be overcome to extend the reach of web services to mass market devices.

This paper presents the challenges you'll need to overcome to build mobile applications that use XML and web services.