As the hype surrounding Web Services shows few signs of relenting, people are beginning to ask more searching questions. In this week's article on WebServicesArchitect.com, we try to present a balanced view of Web Services today.

Read Where are Web Services Today .

Wow! An article that is very well written. The author makes some very interesting observations about security.

Everyone who wishes to author an article should take serious note of the way this article was written. It's easily understandable!

On that same topic, here's an interesting discussion among the J2EE licensees about Web Services - what to do, how to support them, etc., etc.

Great format - it reads like an open and frank discussion.

Interesting articles and there was a similar panel discussion at the "City on Java" conference in London yesterday. In that discussion, in general the technology side was cautiously optimistic with the commercial side not seeing how and where money would be made.

Looking from an "enterprise" viewpoint from the financial marketplace, it seems to me that the industry will pick and choose some parts of web services and ignore others.

SOAP isn't particularly clever (RPC in XML) and has some big holes (security, synchronous only model) but there are many situations in which it is clearly useful and so it will become a key standard.

UDDI is much cleverer but commercial usability at least in the B2B world is a long way off and by the time the security, payment and other issues are addressed, there will be new ideas (maybe utilising some of the UDDI concepts).

WSDL seems to sit in the middle; interestingly the article treats it like a manual that is read by humans and then the application developed rather than a self-modifying application that adapts to WSDL that it reads.

Also of course history suggests that the pick-and-choose outcome is by far the most common in the uptake of new technologies.