Chapter 16: Looking to the Future

Overview

In this final chapter of the book, we’ll look beyond what exists now to what will or might exist in the future. What is being developed that could inspire the world to use Web services on a wider scale? Will a standard practice emerge for implementing the Web service layer of an enterprise application, and if so, what might it be? Specifically, we’ll cover these topics:

• The tasks that standards bodies and developers have ahead of them before Web services can become a truly viable and rich framework for distributed applications

• The problems that currently hamper cross-platform interoperability and their remedies

As with any kind of forecasting, what we say here might well be out of date by the time you read it. The contents of beta products continue to change until the products are released, standards face ongoing problems with intellectual property rights and patents, and release dates are ever slipping. Who’s to say that someone won’t discover or develop something tomorrow that makes Web services obsolete?

That said, let’s get on with it.