Web Services Design Decisions

What's Missing from Web Services?

You might have noticed that some key items found within a distributed component infrastructure are not defined by Web services. Two of the more noticeable omissions are a well-defined API for creating and consuming Web services and a set of component services, such as support for distributed transactions. Let's discuss each of these missing pieces.

• Web service–specific API Most distributed component infrastructures define an API to perform such tasks as initializing the runtime, creating an instance of a component, and reflecting the metadata used to describe the component. Because most high-level programming languages provide some degree of interoperability with C, the API is usually exposed as a flat set of C method signatures. RMI goes so far as to tightly couple its API with a single high-level language, Java.

  In an effort to ensure that Web services are programming language–agnostic, Microsoft has left it up to individual software vendors to bind support for Web services to a particular platform. I will discuss two Web service implementations for the .NET platform, ASP.NET and Remoting, later in the book.

• Component services The Web services platform does not provide many of the services commonly found in distributed component infrastructures, such as remote object lifetime management, object pooling, and support for distributed transactions. These services are left up to the distributed component infrastructure to implement.

  Some services, such as support for distributed transactions, can be introduced later as the technology matures. Others, such as object pooling and possibly object lifetime management, can be considered an implementation detail of the platform. For example, Remoting defines extensions to provide support for object lifetime management, and Microsoft Component Services provides support for object pooling.