By Rachel Chalmers
Hewlett-Packard Co has released the source code to its E-Speak technology. Genaral manager of open services operations, Rajiv Gupta explains that E-Speak is a set of protocols and the software that implements those protocols, all designed as a uniform way to access and interact with services. We want E- Speak to do for services what HTTP and HTML do for the web, he told ComputerWire. By services I mean everything from a travel planning service or a personal finance management service, to access to applications on a service base, as with business-to- business procurement services, to component services like payment and billing, to hosted services, right down to storage and network connection.
In short, E-Speak enables a service-based interaction model for just about everything you can imagine delivering over the web. The exciting part, to me, is the way I can compose the different services together, says Gupta. A home inspection service might be included as part of a mortgage service, which itself could be offered as one component of a personal finance package. It’s a very constructional model, says Gupta. Plus: I can discover these new services dynamically. It’s a little like Sun Microsystems Inc’s Jini, re-imagined for web-based applications, except that Jini doesn’t have any notion of service interaction – auditing, billing, failover, negotiation, mediation or a security model. E-Speak offers all of those.
What Amazon is doing with its hosted services, like zShop, could be re-implemented in E-Speak. The difference, Gupta says, is that Amazon is now having to integrate its latest acquisitions manually. Because there isn’t a common platform, they’re going to do that in a bespoke way, he points out. If all the acquired companies had been E-Speak compliant, they would integrate with one another automatically. Amazon wouldn’t have to re- implement, he says. They could leverage E-Speak in discovery and interaction, take those offerings and wrap them into its existing services.
Gupta admits that the E-Speak name is a little misleading. The technology consists of an architectural specification, XML-based protocols, a software runtime, a set of tools and set of in-house and partner components, including payment and billing. With this latest announcement, all those elements, as well as a software development kit, a service development kit and a wireless application development will be made available under the General Public License (GPL). Application programming interfaces will be released under the Library GPL (LGPL). I’m appealing to software developers, for sure, but I’m also appealing to application and service developers, and defining and appealing to business developers, Gupta says. E-Speak, he insists, is for any person with an idea who wants to be in business on the web. My belief is that what e-speak is going to do for services what the web has done for data, he concludes. Hence the release of the source: We owe it to ourselves and the community to make it available.
