Web Services Interoperability | JavaT P2P Unleashed

As Web services technologies have matured and adoption has accelerated, several levels and versions of the different specifications like SOAP and UDDI are being produced at accelerated rates. Given the potential to have many necessary interrelated specifications at various versions and schedules of development, it is becoming a very difficult task to determine which products support which levels of the specifications. Thus, even though the industry may have the best intentions to ensure interoperability on a per-specification basis, a user of a Web service product (be it a development tool or the Web service itself) would find it very difficult to match several pieces of software necessary to complete a task or build a solution. To address this issue, the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) industry group was formed in February 2002. The group proposes to address the issue through the creation and use of profiles.

The WS-I organization has targeted the following set of deliverables, which can also be found at http://www.ws-i.org:

Profiles Sets of Web services specifications that work together to support specific types of solutions.
Sample implementations With the context of a profile, the teams will work to define a set of Web services that are implemented by multiple team members to identify where interoperability issues are present.
Implementation guidelines Recommendations for use of specifications in ways that have been proven to be the most interoperable. These guidelines also provide the set of test cases that the sniffer and analyzer tools detect for compliance verification.
Sniffer Tools to monitor and log interactions with a Web service. This tool generates a file that can later be processed by the analyzer.
Analyzer Tools that process sniffer logs and verify that the Web service implementation is free from errors.

The first profile, WS-I Basic, has been identified, and consists of the combination of XML Schema 1.0, SOAP 1.1, WSDL 1.1, and UDDI 1.0. The concept of combining different levels of P2P technologies into profiles for interoperability is valuable, and can be a great complement to the CC/PP concept of individual node capabilities and preferences.