Web Services More Than Just Interop
SOAP is not just about interoperability. First of all, SOAP doesn't guarantee interoperability. It ony promotes interoperability, insomuch as it uses XML for data formatting and XML Schemas as a metastructural language. XML facilities for parsing and creating documents are available in most platforms, so by using XML data SOAP is, in a sense, interoperable.
But that's not saying much. By the same line of reasoning one could say IIOP is "interoperable" since it uses a binary data encoding standard. That is, since all utile platforms can read and write binary data, then all applications targeting utile platforms can interoperate through IIOP. Big whoop.
SOAP is much more interesting than just its interop capabilities because:
- SOAP has affinity for HTTP, and consequently its able to pass through firewalls pretty easily.
- SOAP Web Services are assumed to be highly available.
The assertion that SOAP Web Services are only useful where interop is a concern just isn't right. In any distributed system where a service can be employed that should be highly available and reachable even across complicated network topologies, then a Web Service implementation would be advantagous.
So even when client and server applicatios are implemented in the same language, on the same platform, and even assumed to use the same WS toolkit-specific features, a Web Service implementation may still be a good idea. In such cases interop is obviously no concern. Only availability and network reachability.
Consider, for example, the case where a software vendor is deploying several applications within a client's intranet. If the vendor's software would like to communicate, one way to do so would be through a central Web Service which may not even need to be located behind the intranet's firewall.
6:06:48 PM 
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