Wrapping Up
We hope that this series of articles has given you a better understanding of how to go about working web services into your own enterprise. We've explored the philosophy behind web services and looked at the best practices used in developing such services. You've seen how performance evaluations can help you to determine whether your web services are production-ready. We've even provided a reference implementation that can be used to accommodate your organization's needs, auto-generating all the necessary infrastructure components to perform web services.
The source code (about 25MB) that we're making available with this article is for developing web services using attachments versus the document-literal style of web services, but it's easy to convert to supporting doc-lit. The two versions give near-identical performance and usage. With attachments, the actual payload is outside the SOAP envelope. From our perspective, the SOAP envelope and the actual payloads are processed by different entities: the SOAP stub and the business logic, respectively. Keeping them separate eliminates the need for the SOAP stub to parse through the payload entirely, granting better performance. There are some interoperability issues in using web services with attachments, but we hope that those issues will be resolved quickly, making this usage more prevalent.