Salesforce.com has released sforce to provide integration and customization for their customer relationship management (CRM) service. Grand Central has an entire Business Services Network that sells integration as a service. Amazon's SOA focuses mainly on allowing customers to buy listed products, and the eBay service architecture is used by vendors who want to sell their products on the auction site. XMethods provides a directory of third-party services that performs a variety of useful tasks.
As these new services become available more attention will be focused on consuming Web services and combining them like software building blocks into composite applications. Developers and even end users can now create many new applications out of these existing services without the need to create their own SOA or maintain a server environment. This article reviews some popular methods of consuming services, and the technological advantages and disadvantages of the different strategies.
