Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Part 2: Advanced Web Services Technologies and Standards

The plain vanilla Web services technologies we have seen in Part 1 allow us to take disparate applications on a multitude of platforms written by a plethora of vendors and provides a simple, elegant solution to the kinds of problems that engineers and IT professionals encounter on a daily basis. However, up until now we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. And, each of these technologies really can do all that they promise. The problem is that once you cut through the hype, they actually don't promise a great deal.

Certainly, we are told that we can link systems together, and we can. We are also told that heterogeneous platforms aren't a problem any longer, and that is largely true, ...