What's fascinating about Journyx is its strategic use of Web services to support its mission.

---

by Cameron Laird, developer, PhaseIt Inc. Intel Corp.

Web Services (WS) is a winner. More precisely, the conclusion to which Productive Programming returns each month is that developers using WS are winning. Sure, plenty of pundits continue to debate WS' future adoption—while it's already going into successful production for fast-moving organizations.

Earlier in the year, the column emphasized WS' role in projects internal to an organization, and what Intel Corporation's Chief e-Strategist >Christopher Thomas calls the messaging architecture for WS deployment. This summer has seen a new cohort of WS applications blossom, though. For the most part, they share these characteristics:

• WS is becoming mundane. These companies aren't advertising miraculous breakthroughs; they're just delivering solid value to customers. WS plays a part, but only a part.
• At a technical level, they exploit WS remote procedure calls (RPC) as well-standardized, platform-neutral interfaces to promote development of rich clients.
• WS is publicly visible. This isn't about massive internal return-on-investment projects hidden from competitive view, or even extranets restricted to a few favored partners. For these companies, one of WS's benefits is that it's a good way for parties who are not close to communicate across organizational boundaries.

Among the products in this category are Journyx, Inc.'s Timesheet and Timecard.

Making connections
Journyx might seem an unlikely home for technical innovation. It's a tiny company, with only a handful of employees, and no venture-capital backing. It specializes in activity recording, an ancient segment, already automated even before the computer era. Timecard programs are needed so universally and are so easy to write that most working programmers have turned out at least one during their careers.

Figure 1. Journyx, Inc.'s TimeSheet Application, Web Version (click images to enlarge)

To engineer a collaborative version, though, with proper security and performance, careful observance of calendar peculiarities, integration with other applications such as Quickbooks and Project, and rich reporting functions, is more of a challenge. Journyx has done well enough at that challenge to celebrate its fifth year of self-financed growth.