Standards and Coherence
Web services are still in their infancy, but they are poised to make great inroads in the world of distributed application development. The most crucial elements to the long-term success of web services, however, will be standardization and the coherency of those standards. Currently, none of the web service technologies described in this book has any official standing with the W3C or the IETF. SOAP and WSDL have both been submitted to the W3C, but have no official recommendation status. XML-RPC has not been submitted to any standards body. UDDI is currently under the purview of an industry consortium and will probably go through several more iterations before being handed over to a standards body.
In September 2000, the W3C created an XML Protocol Group. This group represented the W3C’s first official foray into the world of web services. Its first task was to create an official recommendation for SOAP, and the group is currently finalizing a SOAP 1.2 specification. In January 2002, the W3C incorporated the XML Protocol Group into a more general Web Services Activity. The new Activity adds Working Groups for Web Services Architecutre and Web Services Description.
Tip
Information about the W3C Web Services Activity is available at http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/.
Most people new to web services are initially overwhelmed by the long list of proposed standards and the complex interactions between each. Standardizing each layer in the web service protocol stack will be a major challenge. Making sure all the layers fit together and make coherent sense to developers will be an even greater challenge.
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