TABLE OF CONTENTS With Web services, given their unique and incontrovertible value proposition as a Web-based software component methodology and the near-universal industry backing, there was never any question about if. It was always about when. That when, per all predictions as well as expectations, has come and gone, but among those actively involved in propagating Web services, the question of when (albeit sotto voce) still persists, even in late 2003.
A big part of the issue here, in terms of timing, is that Web services are an application development related technology, which is most applicable to the development of large corporate applications. Thus, the supply and demand dynamics of Web services, to a very large extent, were going to be influenced from the start by the overall vigor of the software industry. The depressing economic downturn that followed in the wake of the dot.com implosion, which was then further exacerbated by 9/11, could not have come at a worse time in terms of Web services. In essence, the software industry has been treading water since Y2K. This is the backdrop against which the when question has to be rethought and reanswered.
XML Web services in their current form can no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered nascent. They were postulated in early 2000 and were being vociferously promoted by the summer of 2000. In addition, the key prerequisite enabling methodologies, in the form of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, as shown in...
