This is a nice post from Mark Nottingham. He talks about the lack of a good understanding of the architectural issues when we talk about Web Services. I think Mark makes a very good point. Jim and I have been thinking about this for the last couple of months and although we haven’t really blogged about our current thoughts a great deal, we have been busy putting our ideas together as a 32-page (current count) document.

We have taken the opportunity of an invitation to write a chapter for an upcoming book on Service-Oriented Architectures to get our ideas through a peer-review process. We discuss architecture, building blocks (messages and services), and governing principles for SOAs. We talk about architecture, protocol, and implementation views for SOAs before moving to discussing Web Services in the context of SOAs. We then implement a simple example to illustrate our approach and our views on how one should program Web Services (using message-oriented APIs and events).

I hope that our discussion in this chapter will fill in the gap to which Mark alludes.

If the chapter gets through the review process, I will give more details.