This month's Web Services Edge conference marks four years since the first detailed W3C note on the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) and nearly five years since the first public specification of SOAP.
You may be wondering, why hasn't the uptake of Web services matched the bold predictions made when it was first launched? There are certainly more developers thinking about Web services with the advent of service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, the number of successful public Web services projects seems to be limited to a few high-profile companies like eBay and Amazon that have published APIs and end points, or developers who have been able to implement services internally but with a narrow and well-defined set of services - still a long way from the smart application that could self-select services at runtime.
There are many factors that can slow the adoption of a new technology. Sometimes it's a technical barrier, competition from an alternative technology, or simply customer reluctance to move to something new. To shine a light on some of the issues that developers experience with early Web services, I can share some of my own experiences with adopting Web services into the J2SE platform.
