9.1. So Many Changes

The year 2002 saw many innovations and changes in the Web Services space. Technology vendors rolled out several major releases of Web Services toolkits or reference implementations. For example, we have seen several releases of Java Web Services Developer Pack since March of 2002 (Early Access 1, Early Access 2, Version 1.0, and recently Version 1.0_1). IBM's Web Services Toolkit has also drastically upgraded from Release 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.3.2 with considerable architectural changes, to support new Web Services specifications.

The Web Services user marketplace is also responding to Web Services technology. We have seen faster adoption of ebXML in the industry, such as Open Applications Group (http://www.openapplications.org/projects/projects.htm) and Open Travel Alliance (http://www.opentravel.org/opentravel/spec.cfm). The Google search engine has added Web Services support by providing a Web API developer's kit (http://www.google.com/apis/). This enables a remote client to perform extensible information or product search from one of the largest search engines on the Web and get the search result returned in XML.

Another interesting example is that Amazon now provides Web Services integration to its potential business partners who want it (refer to Chapter 2, The Web Services Phenomenon and Emerging Trends). In other words, online stores who want to cross-sell Amazon's books, electronics, video products, or even auction services can now provide these services using their own branding. This allows Amazon's potential business partners to search Amazon's products online and even add items to an Amazon.com Shopping Cart, Wish List, or Wedding Registry directly from their applications. The search result will be returned as XML documents (see Figure 9-1). Developers can download a sample toolkit from the URL http://www.amazon.com/webservices.