But There s More to Web Services Than Just UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP

But There's More to Web Services Than Just UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP

Many writers limit their discussion of Web services to a description of the UDDI registry and WSDL/templates/SOAP programmatic interface. This is fine if you just want to understand what the formal Web services standards are.

But UDDI registry and WSDL/SOAP are only half of the picture. To understand Web services you need to understand what XML is and what it can do. You also need to understand how application development environments are being tied to Web services to make application development easier. And you need to realize that, for Web services to be used in enterprise-class mission-critical computing environments, issues such as reliability, security, and routing will need to be addressed. To function in real-world production environments Web services need to match the sophistication of more mature architectures such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture or Electronic Data Interchange which means that additional standards must be developed to deal with complex routing, security, and reliability issues and a whole host of other enterprise-class architectural issues (detailed later in this book). Without these additional improvements, Web services will be merely an "interesting" messaging service.

Further, to truly exploit Web services, attention needs to be paid to application development environments, business process/work flow, and business process management as well as to information presentation, personalization, and system integration. Over time, standards committees will deal with these issues, but meanwhile, failure to adequately address them will limit the use of Web services in a live enterprise-class environment.

As you will see later in this book, significant changes and improvements are underway that will help make Web services viable for production use in enterprises. You will see that entire architectures growing up around Web services communications protocols and registry services are helping to fill in the gaps until the standards mature. (These architectures are offered by companies like IBM and Microsoft.) You will also find that Web services applications can be built and deployed using XML for information transfer and other protocols and approaches for program-to-program communications. In other words, vendors are adding functionality to compensate for certain Web services shortcomings (like security), while other protocols can be used until Web services protocols and registries mature a bit more.