Chapter Summary

This chapter has provided the background information you need to narrow your search for a Web services application development product suite or platform. Its aim is to steer you toward the best vendor with the best approach to meet your particular Web services application development needs.

In this chapter you learned that there are several ways to obtain Web services. First, you can buy a Web services application server environment (from either a hardware/software/services supplier or a software platform maker). Second, you can build one yourself, using a la carte programs or open-source software. Third, you can turn to a professional services supplier GSX or IBM or any of a number of others.

If you look closely, you'll see that few vendors offer a comprehensive Web services development platform with full support for UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP. But vendors are building Web services applications today. They are doing it by mixing and matching existing applications environments (CORBA, for instance) with the Web services protocols that they do support. Remember, Web services applications can be built by using alternative programmatic interfaces to the WSDL and SOAP protocols and by hard-coding program locations as opposed to using UDDI. And this is what is happening today.