WS-I Basic Profile: a practitioner's view

Interoperability refers to the ability of software and hardware on multiple machines from multiple vendors to communicate with each other without significant changes on either side. Web services streamline enterprise application integration by making it easier to tie applications running on heterogeneous platforms together helping them communicate correctly, effectively and at reduced cost. The difficulty of integration is a function of the level of interoperability between the applications being integrated. Even though there are established standards for Web services messaging (SOAP), description (WSDL) and discovery and registry (UDDI), custom implementations of these protocols by individual vendors has led to various interoperability issues. Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) recently released Basic Profile 1.0, addressing the interoperability issues with core Web services standards. In this paper, we look at some of the key Web services interoperability issues pointed out by practitioners and critically examine how Basic Profile 1.0 addresses them. Further we also examine some limitations of the profile. We conclude by evaluating a popular Web services implementation against the profile and present our observations.