You have reached the end of your excursion into Web services. We conclude in this part with two final chapters.
Chapter 17, "Futures," has a certain speculative nature. It briefly sketches technology areas that should be added to the WS-* stack of standards at some point in the future. It covers the semantics of Web service interactions and additional aggregation mechanisms for Web services.
Chapter 18, "Conclusion," discusses the process by which the Web services platform is being defined and standardized, why it will succeed, and what the risk factors are. Furthermore, this chapter explains some of the work in progress to build other functionality on top of the core Web services platform presented in this book. In particular, it covers technologies that are essential to enable Grid computing and to manage Web services.
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