Making Sense of all these Crazy Web Service Standards. It has been eight years now since SOAP and WSDL (Web Service Description Language) were introduced as standards to facilitate communication and data exchange between heterogeneous systems.
Since then, a flurry of protocols, collectively named WS*, have also been introduced as extensions to SOAP (and in some cases WSDL) to facilitate specific communication requirements and scenarios. The categories of WS* are broad, and it has reached a point where the sheer number of standards is so great that despite a core set being implemented in many platforms, many in the web service community are confused about which standards they should care about, when and why. Furthermore, concerns over interoperability prevail, as each standard traverses its lifecycle of development, early adoption, ratification and update. Revisiting SOAP+WSDL It turns out that WSDL (Web Services Description Language) combined with SOAP is what really improved developer productivity for developing systems that share data. Dispatching in a REST Protocol Application.
August 17, 2005 In my last column I covered how to dispatch based on mime type.
That's only part of the dispatching story. The ServerSide Interoperability Blog » Mini-guide: Apache Web Se.