Digital Earth Weblog

John Udell has written a really interesting article on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the state of web services, over at InfoWorld. Well worth a read if you are implementing web services.

The article points out that for most point-to-point web services plain old XML over HTTP is all you need. This is the approach taken by the Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) standards.

When the services get more complex then the WS-* stack becomes relevant, but the technical complexity and opportunity for vendor lock-in suddenly increase dramatically. However, most of us can get the job done by moving XML documents around the Web.

Thanks to Tim Bray for the heads up.