Originally posted by Sudharsan Govindarajan:
It is disturbing to know that I can't write a standard WSS based service and assume that it can be consumed by any standard WS client
The reality is that the more WS-* extensions you require the more you reduce your potential "consumer audience". SOAP is extensible - that doesn't mean that all SOAP clients are extensible. Theoretically with the extension standard in hand you could tinker with the SOAP envelope to make it work - but nobody does that because it is time-consuming, tedious and error prone. It seems that the Perl and Ruby communities have given up on SOAP and moved towards POX-over-HTTP (Plain Old XML) or RESTful HTTP Web Services - I wouldn't be surprised if PHP is going to follow the move. There a little bit of tinkering can still get you a long way, TLS/SSL provides you with transport security and you can still use XML encryption/digital signature for XML bodies.
So in the end SOAP isn't the universal "over-the-web" service access protocol.
[ December 02, 2008: Message edited by: Peer Reynders ]