The Road Ahead

This chapter focused on the de facto standard protocol for Web service invocation as of the time of this writing—SOAP 1.1. (SOAP 1.2 is still in early draft stage.) However, many more pieces to the puzzle are required to bring meaningful Web services-enabled business solutions online. The rest of the book will complete the Web services puzzle. Chapter 5 focuses on building secure, robust, scalable enterprise-grade Web services. Chapter 6 introduces the concept of service descriptions and the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Chapter 7 discusses service registries and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) effort. Chapter 8 reviews the state of the currently available Web services tooling. Chapter 9 looks at the exciting world of Web service futures. This said, the next chapter offers a short detour for those who are truly excited about building and consuming extensible, high-performance Web services—it is about building Web services using the advanced features of Apache Axis.