When and Why You Should Care About Interoperability

First of all, you must care about interoperability when providing a SOAP development tool. Second, as the developer of a SOAP-based solution, you should also think about interoperability issues, depending on the nature of the solution and, more important, on the production environment for the solution.

Fortunately for developers, most of the SOAP implementations take interoperability very seriously. Unfortunately for developers, this isnt always enough to guarantee headache -free implementations. The SOAP specification and the WSDL specification are very flexible and respecting them doesnt guarantee complete interoperability.

Interoperability often becomes a major issue when a solution is intended to run in an open environment. An example would be a SOAP server that will serve multiple clients built using different development tools (and potentially running on many different platforms). A SOAP service exposed over the Internet (e.g., a weather service or news service) will need to have interoperability issues taken into account as key factors during the design stage.

On the other hand, solutions intended to work in a closed environment can afford to focus less on interoperability issues. This is the case when the client is developed at the same time as the server, probably using the same development tool. In these cases, any interoperability issues can be discovered and fixed early in the development phase. Even in these cases, however, the planned lifetime (or, more likely, the unplanned lifetime) of the solution may still make interoperability an important factor. After all, do you really want your client and server to know about and rely on the implementation details of the other?