A Field Perspective on the Interoperability of Web Services

In a typical web services environment, a web service framework supports the client and server interaction by, among other tasks, announcing the services interfaces and translating application-level service calls to SOAP messages. Although designed to support inter-operation, research and practice suggest that existing client-side and server-side frameworks, many times, cannot fully inter-operate. The problem is that, as web services are increasingly being deployed to support business-critical environments, interoperability issues may prevent or impact business transactions, potentially resulting in huge financial and reputation losses. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of the interoperability of 1024 publicly available web services, against a set of diverse and well-known client-side web service frameworks. We have detected at least one severe interoperability issue in over 53% of the services tested and quite different inter-operation capabilities regarding the client-side frameworks. Results clearly show that, although providers frequently claim interoperability capabilities, urgent improvements are required.