Key Insights

• Web services architecture is weak (at this juncture) in several areas that are vital for mission-critical applications such as reliability, security, and manageability.

• Standards committees, the open-source community, and vendors are addressing these shortcomings. As a result, I believe that Web services architecture can be deployed in mission critical computing environments today if properly augmented with third-party products.

Chapter 3 provided additional technical details about various Web services protocols, the registry, and the XML format/language. It also alluded to the fact that many Web services applications are now being built using other protocols (like COM or CORBA) in lieu of WSDL or SOAP. The reason is that Web services are still, in some respects, immature for handling complex, reliable, secure transactional and computational tasks.

This chapter takes a look at some of the weak points of today's Web services architecture. Improvements, however, are being made on a daily basis, and all of the issues raised in this section are in the process of being overcome.