Assessing the Risk and Value of Adopting Emerging and Unstable Web Services Specifications

Abstract

With the proliferation of Web services specifications, the question of which of the multiplicity of technologies to adopt arises. While sometimes the decision can be based purely on matching requirements to protocol capabilities, a harder consideration is whether the chosen specifications will enable wide interoperability with other systems, or lead to an architectural dead-end. We present a risk assessment of several contemporary WS-* protocols, enabling architects and developers to make sane choices for service interoperability.