Making Web Services Work

Abstract

Web Services are the new components in application development. They offer some serious advantages over previous component models, not the least of those being that they are easy to use (through SOAP method invocations) and that they are maintained by third parties (the service providers) rather than requiring in-house effort. However, the Web Services paradigm is not without its drawbacks. In particular since the components of an application are hosted by third parties over which we have little control and the fact that they are often located remotely, there is an increased risk of failure during operation than would be the case if we had bought and installed components locally on an intranet.