Summary

Although SOAP on its own does not provide a complete interoperability framework, it does give you a foundation on which to build, and we expect that foundation to improve due to the efforts of both standard bodies such as the W3C and communities like soapbuilders. Higher-level standards such as WSDL help a lot, and luckily, Web service software is beginning to integrate WSDL support as a standard feature.

Clearly, you have many tools to choose from when you're dealing with SOAP, and more are becoming available every day. The momentum is huge, and we hope this chapter has given you a glimpse into the level of activity in the Web services arena, and a few specific examples of how easy it can be to make Java talk to C# talk to Perl.

As you'll see in Chapter 9, many people and organizations are contributing to that momentum and taking the service-enabled Web to the next level, in a variety of directions.