Sorting out the Web services tangle

After more than two years of hype over Web services, in 2002 the technology industry began to sort out fact from fiction.

There's still friction between software makers over who offers the best support for Web services, and there's still confusion over just what Web services is all about. But key standards, interoperability groups and, more importantly, products took shape in the past year. And the benefits of using Web services to easily link business applications is becoming clearer to IT buyers.

"This has been a year where Web services moved from promise to product," said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with market researcher ZapThink in Waltham, Mass.

The tug-of-war between the two primary development camps, Microsoft's .Net architecture and Java, favored by Sun Microsystems, Oracle, BEA Systems and other software makers, continued unabated. But, after months of public bickering, both sides came together as part of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), dedicated to making competing schemes interoperable.

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