Conclusion

Developers have only recently started to use SOAP and Web services in real-world applications. Although serious efforts were taken to completely solve the interoperability problems, different implementations are still rarely 100 percent interoperable. The common scenarios (the data types that have a correspondence in most of the programming languages, simple or complex aggregated types) are usually interoperable between various implementations . Some minor details (e.g., uncommon types) might still generate problems, but ATL Server was designed to be flexible enough to allow developers to easily work around these problems.

The next chapter will continue our in-depth presentation of the ATL Server Web services. Youll learn how the SOAP support can be extended to perform such tasks as using a different transport protocol or parsing generic XML content.