A well-planned Web Service interoperability environment begins by clearly
defining who your Web Service consumers are now and in the future. There was
a time not so long ago when you could count on a fairly homogenous consumer
population. This was about the same time that you were happy just to be able
to get a Web Service running in the first place and finding a consumer who
could actually interact with your Web Service was cause for celebration.
Those days have changed however and Web Services interoperability, once a
"fancy" addition to your SOA design, is now a key and indispensable
requirement in most SOA scenarios.
Today, SOA architects must contend with complex scenarios that assume a
variety of Web Service consumers or in many cases are asked to create Web
Services that are generic enough to be interoperable with just about any
known consumer. If you're ser... (more)