The Future Challenges of Web Services

The term "web services" appeared several years ago to describe a set of software specifications designed to make incompatible programs communicate over Internet protocols.

In their effort to make these Web services systems reliable and more flexible, vendors have supplemented the basic Web services specifications with a number of extensions.

Defenders of advanced Web services specifications say they are needed to ensure that new computing architectures are flexible enough to accommodate both sophisticated and smaller-scale applications. The rallying cry for people who favor simplicity is a technology approach called REST, or Representational State Transfer, a method of building applications by sending XML documents over existing Internet protocols.

The long-running dispute has even drawn in some of the technological veterans of Web services. Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, said recently on his site pages : "I look at Google and Amazon and EBay and Salesforce and see them doing tens of millions of transactions a day involving pumping XML back and forth over HTTP" 

The growing concerns over Web services complexity grew louder in recent weeks with the publication of three new specifications. There are other programmers who share Bray's concerns. Rather than learn the latest specifications for doing Web services security, some developers claim that simply sending XML-formatted documents over existing Internet protocols can consume time.

Some corporate customers see in the Web services technology an endless standardization process. Defenders of REST believe that it allows the same application-to-application communication that Web services promises.

Microsoft earlier this month set online a white paper stating that Web service protocols are designed to be autonomous, allowing developers to select the level of sophistication they need.

This section  http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/organizations.html   provides a brief background on many of the important consortia and standards organizations working on specifications related to Web Services. Some experts claim that programmers and their employers cannot absorb the flow of new specifications, which makes the improvements more time consuming than promising.