Programming Web Services with SOAP

Chapter 9. The Future of Web Services

Throughout this book, we've maintained a fairly narrow focus on what web services are and how to go about creating them. To finish up, we will spend some time discussing the future of web services from both the point of view of the technologies, and from the point of view of the architecture as a whole. Specifically, we'll discuss the futures of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, as well as the next generation of even more useful and powerful services.

The Future of Web Development

Before we get into where the technologies are going in the future, let's take a moment to highlight exactly how web services are most likely to impact web development.

We've spent a great deal of time talking about interoperability. With web services, we're concerned about how to find information and move it across the Web. Issues that used to be important, such as the programming language in which the code was written, the operating system on which the code is running, the object model on which the code is based, or the vendor of the underlying database system, don't matter that much anymore.

Now that's a strong statement. Some may even say that it is too strong. Here's the reasoning.

First, prior to web services, the vast majority of enterprise-scale development platforms were rather inbred. Java applications worked best with Java applications; COM applications worked best with COM applications; CORBA applications worked best with CORBA applications, and so on. To make the most ...