Chapter Summary

Many books on the subject of Web services tend to be overly optimistic they overlook some of the shortcomings or challenges being faced by evolving Web services architecture.

There are, at this juncture, several obstacles that potential adopters should be aware of as they look to build and implement their own Web services implementations. There are also several work-arounds that can be used to get around Web services protocol, registry, security, reliability, and other shortcomings. Some of these work-arounds include:

• Hard-coding the location of applications so that applications know where to find each other (this was covered in Chapter 3).

• Using point products to fill in the gaps in Web services architecture (the Forum Systems secure XML Web services appliance is a good example of such an approach).

• Using "complete" Web services products (such as IBM's WebSphere platform discussed in Chapter 1) that fill in the Web services-gaps while also providing rich application development tools, business process management tools, and the like.

Today's Web services are robust enough to be used in mission-critical computing environments. But they need to be augmented with third-party products in order to be used in secure, reliable, highly transactional business situations. Fortunately, the tools and products needed to supplement and augment the shortcomings in Web services are currently available. (Many of these solutions are discussed in depth in the vendor selection chapter of this book.)