Java Web Services

Chapter 9. Web Services Interoperability

The Concept of Interoperability

Much of the promise of web services is its potential for seamless interoperability across heterogeneous systems, platforms, applications, and programming languages. Interoperability is a primary goal of web services. However, it is not a given. Web services standards facilitate interoperability, but do not ensure it. Many considerations and issues need to be resolved to achieve full interoperability. As the number of specifications expands to address gaps, so do the interoperability challenges.

A web service has many potential clients, and this array of clients can use a variety of libraries and providers to connect. Services can, in turn, become clients of other services. Ensuring that clients based on different implementations of the standards can interoperate with the service is critical to the service’s success.

This chapter points out many issues that currently prohibit interoperability. It also focuses on the positive aspects of web services, including community efforts such as the SOAPBuilders Interoperability Labs, an organization chartered with identifying interoperability problems, fixing them through consensus, and creating compliance tests. Their goal is to provide a community environment in which anyone can test for interoperability with other web services infrastructures.