Today's message is really simply. Please consider it, when in doubt whether to apply webservices or not:
"Webservices are for integration, not for inter-tier distribution."
This also goes to all .NET and Java consultants out there, who like to present one-click webservice-creation in VS.NET or WSAD: Please don't forget to remind your audience about it. I know that some of you didn't, that's why a lot of people who want to place the webservice-badge on their intranet application now put their whole business layer behind webservices (instead of EJBs (over RMI/IIOP) resp. COM+ services (over DCOM), or no distribution at all using a simple business facade and plain DTOs, or whatever other better-suited solution).
Webservice PROs and CONs
(+) Interoperability between various software applications running on different platforms and/or locations.
(+) Enforces open standards and protocols.
(+) HTTP will go through firewalls with standard filtering rules.
(+) Enables loose coupling (when using Document- instead of RPC-style resp. XML extensibility).
(-) Features such as transactions are either nonexistent or still in their infancy compared to more mature distributed computing standards such as RMI, CORBA, or DCOM.
(-) Poor performance in comparison to other approaches (lower network throughput because of text-based data, XML parsing / transformation required).
This implies: When there is no need for platform interop and firewall pass-through, but for things like high performance and transaction monitoring, don't use webservices as your main business layer protocol. You can still selectively publish webservices to the outside world, which may then call into your business layer (J2EE and COM+ offer direct support on that, e.g. direct mapping to Enterprise Service facades resp. Session Bean facades). But if it's just your intranet client or your web application calling into your business layer, please don't let each call run through the complete SOAP stack.
Things can get even worse than that: Because more and more people practice senseless and blind technology-overuse, there is a project out there where report layouts are being downloaded to the client embedded in .NET assemblies marshalled as byte-arrays over webservices, all of this within one corporate network (where there is no need for interoperability (all is done in .NET) nor HTTP). No kidding. This is for real.
