Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Summary

While we cannot with any certainty predict what the future holds for Web services, there do seem to be some commonsense observations that we can offer. The first of these is that the Web services community by and large consists of a plethora of small vendors offering technologies and services at the bottom end, and a handful of large vendors (dominated by IBM and Microsoft) at the top end of the scale. Given the sheer number of smaller vendors (and the prevailing economic conditions), we expect there will be a degree of consolidation with the larger vendors using their financial muscle to add smaller vendors' niche technologies into their portfolios.

On a technical level, we expect that a number of technologies, which largely follow the ...