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Web services directions: how far have we gone? (xml in transit).

Article Excerpt
It's been a long time since the last XML in Transit column. Did you miss my musing on Web services? I doubt it. More likely, you were busy keeping up with all the new initiatives in the Web services space. Those of you with corporate responsibilities were probably wondering how to get some real ROI out of Web services. The more entrepreneurial of you were thinking how to make money in this new world.

I too have been trying to organize my thoughts. This is going be the first in a series of articles that go beyond the basic SOAP/WSDL/UDDI Web services stack to cover the innovation and market dynamics in adjacent areas that are of key significance to the evolution and ultimate success or failure of Web services as the new new thing in distributed application development, assembly, and integration.

The Basic Technology Stack

Figure 1 shows the basic Web services interoperability stack the way most people would think of it up to last year. Going from the bottom up, in a typical Web services scenario we have HTTP as the communication protocol, XML for data representation, XML Schema for data format specification, SOAP for service invocation, WSDL for service description, and UDDI for service discovery. This technology stack enabled the basic Web services workflow described in Figure 2. We've covered these technologies and the publish-find-bind processes in detail in past issues of XML in Transit.

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

What we get from the combination of these technologies is the ability to connect disparate systems. Okay, I'm simplifying things a bit, but I think the basic message holds true. The potential is there for doing much more...

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