Tony Baer and Ron Schmelzer have written an excellent overview of web services grounded in the reality of what potential end users of the technologies are really thinking.
In the real world, transactions need to be secure, manageable and reliable. And to make Web services useful for businesses, there needs to be a way to codify business rules to build the Web services equivalent of applications. These requirements are far from unique to Web services.
But they are likely to be far more complex. “One of our biggest challenges for Web services today is how to authenticate the cardholder seamlessly, which requires directories to talk to directories,” said Simon Pugh, vice president of infrastructure, standards and alliances for credit-card network MasterCard.