Web Services in 2005

Back from a two week vacation (okay, I was back yesterday, but I was really busy yesterday), I wanted to reflect a little on the coming year and where Web services will be going.  To start off I want to say where we are with Web services.  First of all, I"ve recently had the opportunity to look at a lot of resumes for a position that is not specficially Web service related.  What is cool is that the majority of the resumes indicated that the candidates had experience working with Web services.  This was a bit surprising to me but pleasantly so.  I would say that a large number of folks have:

1. Done the work to grok what Web services are about.
2. Have done the work to create a Web service.
3. Have even deployed a Web service.

This is very cool but I would venture to say that these Web services probably have:

1. Little security
2. questionable interoperability
3. questionable message design

In 2005, I see this changning greatly.  WSE 2.0 and other tools have come out with, or are coming out with, interoperable WS-Security implementations, WS-I Basic Profile compliant services are creating better interoperability, and message design best practices are slowly making there way out into the community and the tools.

Other WS-* specifications will progress to the state WS-Security is at this year, Indigo will see to that.  And we can expect to see interoperable Kerberos over WS-Security in about that timeframe (I think this is huge).  Also I think we will see some non-HTTP bound SOAP messages traversing intranets before long.  I would guess that routed SOAP messaging will still be in its early stages still by the end of the year.

But ultimately what I really expect in this coming years that that Web services will go from that thing that you have tried once or twice, to an integral part of almost all your development projects.

Happy New Year!

   -Matt