Fred Hartman

It is sometimes beneficial to stop what you're doing, take a look around, and see where you've come from and where you are going. This regrouping is taking place right now across the software industry and is focused on the problem space of Web service description, discovery, and integration. At a high level, this article briefly discusses the progress made to date at solving the problem, describes the benefits and shortcomings of current technology, and presents a vision of the possible future of Web services infrastructure. At its most fundamental level, this article deals with the idea of programmatically locating a Web service that satisfies a specific need and then (programmatically) integrating that service into an application. SOAP 1.1 (Simple Object Access Protocol) was published as a W3C Note in May 2000 and has since become an industry-standard format for en... (more)