Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Summary

Perhaps the single most important factor that sets Web services apart from previous distributed systems frameworks is not interoperability as we might at first think (since if vendors were enthusiastic enough they could have made prior systems interoperate), but extensibility. In contrast to previous systems like CORBA, where the message format and content were closely tied together—each bit in a message field was fixed and had significance for some a priori determined protocol—SOAP is modular and arbitrarily extensible for new protocols. This extensibility has been exemplified in this chapter. We have seen disparate enterprise requirements like transactions and security implemented in such a way that they are both independent of one-another ...