The best way to understand the utility of WebSI, is by describing its main features. The following describes WebSI taken as a whole:

Data-centric approach – On the contrary to a process-centric approach, WebSI-based applications firstly focus on their business data, and then on the corresponding business logic. Both, entity-relationship and XML data models are supported.

Composition of web services – WebSI relies on composition of web services, the emerging technology for distributed applications, in order to materialise applications business logic.

High-level design & development graphical tools – Presentation and business layers are developed through high-level graphical editors, which make intensive use of XML and associated technologies, like XSL, and composition of web services.

Zero programming option – Programming can be reduced to zero or confined within components that are assembled by WebSI tools. This, along with the support of dynamic invocation of web services, reduces drastically the need for programming. 

Platform independence – the WebSI method operates at a high level and can be applied to any technological solution for what concerns the hardware, database, web server, application server and web service invocation framework technology. The choice of implementation environment can be postponed or changed easily.

Platform interoperability – integration with existing information system infrastructures relies on standard XML-based open architectures and technologies, namely web services and XML-based events, opening WebSI to virtually any existing external systems. Besides, XML, XQuery, XML Schema and Web Services are commonly agreed interfaces and standards when integrating data and content. JSR-225 (XQJ, a JDBC API for XQuery) and JSR-170 (Java API for Content Repositories) are examples of emerging standards that will consume such standards in order to mediate heterogeneous information and pass-over result sets to applications like Portals, Business Intelligence platforms and the like.

Within the toolkit, the WebML Suite provides specific abilities to model and design web-based applications, generating the required code:

Conceptual modelling also of the front end – the model supported in WebSI enables the high-level design of the front end, which is normally not available in other Web development environments. This enables the automatic generation of Web applications interfacing the data layer and a document manager.

Visual programming – With WebML “you get what you think”, because the natural thinking of designers is embodied within expressive visual formalisms.

Automatic documentation – WebML designs are automatically self-documented in a standard format that follows the Javadoc documentation for Java applications.

In WebSI, business data can be supported by active XML documents:

Alive XML – Business data is supported as XML views endowed with web services composition flows encapsulating the business logic/knowledge/know-how associated. That way, logic is tightly attached to data as ‘composition flows’, allowing easier maintenance and reuse. These flows support long-running stateful sessions, so that an active document “remember” its state in between invocations, being able to go back and forth in the composition procedure.

Reactive business documents vs. static documents – Active Documents “know” how to get instantiated at every moment, and can also react to application-specific external XML-based events through event listeners inserted in the associated flows.

Transparent reuse of distributed business logic – By building libraries of related active documents, an easy and transparent sharing of business logic is automatically achieved. A portion of an active document imported in another one is in fact expanding its own flow with the involved part of the one imported. Notice that both documents might reside in different sites, leading to a distributed business logic model.

Simple interface based on data requests – Active Documents keep the standard way of interacting with XML documents, through XPath queries. 

Standard rendering – Active Documents can be rendered with any standard technology for XML, such as XSL, XSL-FO, etc as they are full standard XML.

WebSI provides also a powerful suite for XML-based data integration, following  a twofold approach, warehousing and mediation:

Unified data access to heterogeneous information sources – Current data programming technologies are more or less specific to data source types. In real-world applications, however, data frequently comes from a variety of sources, including relational databases, custom data access layers, Web services, XML data stores, JMS messages, and enterprise information systems. This heterogeneity poses a significant challenge for application developers because of the broad diversity of programming models they need to learn and use. The plethora of data access APIs is an even more significant challenge for tools and frameworks that attempt to automate many common data programming tasks, such as binding UI components to back-end data sources. Thus, a common facility for representing collections of data regardless of data source type can provide a simpler, unified programming model for the application programmer, as well as providing new opportunities for tools and frameworks to work across heterogeneous data sources consistently.

Double approach: warehousing and mediation – Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is a growing market, driven by data-intensive applications. Based on the type of content and maturity of its processes, market can opt either for a warehousing approach or a mediation one using virtual queries. Each approach has its drawbacks and benefits. WebSI Data Integration Suite embeds both technologies offering the freedom to choose which solution best fits a customer's constraints.

Data views persistence – By providing both Mediation and Warehouse approaches, the WebSI Data Integration Suite allows the definition of persistent data views, including query and associated result sets history.  

Process automation for more efficiency and new application domains – Never achievable before, the WebSI Data Integration Suite enables to trigger (in the RDBMS sense) events feeding processes based on content (semi-structured) events, like update of content or result set change of a given query.

All in all, WebSI provides great benefits to customers:

Revolutionary approach to development – WebSI turns programmers into analysts, which induces a rise of the intellectual competence of Web designers, and boosts the cultural growth of the Web design community.

Increase of productivity – WebSI gives to application development a boost in productivity as it shortens dramatically the phases of programming, publication, and maintenance of the solution. All the efforts are concentrated on analysis, design, and prototyping.

Ease of reuse – Portions of the application of arbitrary complexity can be easily disassembled and reused – this is, for example, inherent to the active documents model -. New components designed for performing special tasks can be integrated in WebSI, thanks to extensibility of the WebML method and of the WebSI software.

Quality of the deployed application ­– The use of a high-level and structured approach during analysis and design induces a regular and well-organized application, where all Web pages exhibit a regular structure and a homogeneous look-and-feel. Results of designs naturally satisfy the usability requirements of Web applications.

Reduced total cost of ownership – The total cost of developing solutions is highly reduced because in WebSI the programming of solutions is globally at a much higher level than with competing systems. Resulting ownership costs are low not only due to reduced development costs, but also due to the reduction of adaptive and evolution maintenance.

XML business documents – WebSI uses XML to support business data. These documents might be defined within organisations as well as standards agreed at diverse levels (market, regional, national, international) facilitating eBusiness. Associated logic can be attached to each type of document through Active Documents technology.

Content Integration – When it comes to managing and re-using content usually locked in spread formats like Word, PDF or Text files (also called semi-structured content), it is important to explicitly uncover the content's structure by means of a pivotal format like XML. XML is well suited as it is the interface that prevails in EII solutions. Also it is gaining visibility and market traction. It also explicitly expresses the link between information and its semantics. Therefore, transforming legacy contents to XML enables querying vast amounts of non-exploited information in order to make more accurate decisions.

Better decision-making – Today business decisions are made based on the 20% of the information that sits in relational databases. EII and in particular ECI are new means to make decisions that take a broader spectrum of information, from structured to semi-structured ones, with little incremental costs.