Take the Long View
Having discussed a whole set of shortcomings that exist in Web Services today, I feel that I should redress the balance a little between pessimism and optimism. None of the information in this article is news to Web Service product vendors. Initiatives are already in place in these areas to try to address all of these issues. However, standards are still being formed, technologies are still shaking out, and members of the vendor community are staking their various claims to the territory. It will be several years yet before you can use Web Services as an "out of the box" mechanism to integrate multiple applications from a variety of vendors in a solution that requires industrial-strength features such as end-to-end security and transaction support.