Web Services, Specifications, and Interoperability

Keeping up with the goings-on in the IT industry is a big challenge. Here's a short but informative article that might help you:

Web Services, WS-* Specifications, and Interoperability

"Interoperability is an important factor in the success of solutions that are based on Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), along with other key factors such as contracts, loose coupling, and reuse.

Interoperability is generally accomplished by developing your Web Services using the well-established guidelines for implementing Web services and by following industry standards such as XML, WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI. However, just following Web Services standards and guidelines during the development phase of a project isn't sufficient to achieve interoperability.

As the Web Services industry evolves, it embraces new specifications like WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM), and WS-AtomicTransactions (WS-AT) to provide advanced functionalities such as security, reliability, and transactions that are not provided by the basic specifications. These specifications are generally referred to as the WS-* (pronounced WS-Star) specifications. As they are relatively new and have not been so widely agreed on by the industry, achieving interoperability between Web Services that use WS-* specifications is much more difficult and the WS-* specifications may not even be supported in many products."

This SYS-CON SOA Web Services Journal article by Sanjay Narang "provides a set of guidelines and best practices that you can follow to accomplish interoperability when developing web services that make use of the WS-* specifications across products provided by different vendors. It also provides insight into the Web Services specifications situation that contains a large number of WS-* specifications that are being developed by different groups."