Scenarios for SOAP WS-* Web Services

The SOAP WS-* approach provides a broad set of standards and specifications for quality of service features and also gives developers a lot of flexibility to define custom interfaces for the services that they wish to expose. This flexibility is useful for application-to-application integration scenarios internal to an organization. This is also useful in scenarios in which legacy applications need to be exposed to the rest of the enterprise. In either of these scenarios, the existing applications often constrain how the services may be exposed, so the flexibility to design service interfaces that can adapt to these constraints is important. Additionally, in these scenarios the services are often providing complex functionality and processes that may be difficult to model in a resource-oriented manner with uniform interfaces. It is also these types of scenarios that typically require many of the complex quality of service features that the SOAP WS-* approach has broad support for. Finally, these types of scenarios are more commonly found inside a single organization and less so across organizational boundaries. The SOAP WS-* approach typically results in large number of custom interfaces, but when this is occurring within a single organization, they are a lot easier to control and maintain than in scenarios where there are many organizations that are dependent on those interfaces.

soa, web services, REST, SOAP