Java Web Services

Potential Interoperability Issues

There are certainly enough interoperability issues to worry about in the present. Unfortunately, they aren’t the entire story. A number of other issues are poised to become a problem as web services standards continue to develop.

Layering Decisions

Several extensions, such as security and reliability, are necessary to complete the web services picture. However, standards bodies have not yet decided where these extensions belong. IBM has proposed HTTPR (reliable HTTP), while other participants in web services standards development disagree about whether reliability belongs at the transport protocol level. ebXML has added reliability in their message protocol standard. The same issue exists for security (some of these issues are discussed in Chapter 10) and quality of service (QoS).

Standards Development and Proliferation

Currently, the W3C and other standards bodies are trying to identify which gaps in the web services standards most need to be filled. Reliability and security are mentioned most often, but beyond that, there is no consensus about which missing standards are most critical or what the list should even include. Standards groups are not coordinated as they try to address these gaps, so a proliferation of competing standards often duplicates or overlaps. This proliferation will undoubtedly cause additional interoperability issues to surface. To add to the confusion, vertical markets often create their own standards to expedite business ...