By Rich Salz
Rich Salz asks how the xml:id conundrum, and the interaction with XML Canonicalization, should be solved. 02/23/2005

By Paul Madsen
Paul Madsen reports on the developments in web services security, including a new major release of SAML, which provides the basis for building federated identity. 01/12/2005

By Edd Dumbill
A recent article by Mark Nottingham suggests that RDF may well be the answer to the difficulties inherent in specifying web services with W3C XML Schema. Edd Dumbill reports. 08/11/2004

By Paul Madsen
How do interconnecting web services know who to trust? We examine the role of Security Token Services in mediating trust netweem services. 05/26/2004

By Arulazi Dhesiaseelan
A look at the changes to the W3C's Web Services Description Language in its upcoming second version. 05/20/2004

By Kendall Grant Clark
The recent News.com interview with Bob Glushko spawned a rash of debate among XML developers. The topic? Standards, of course! Kendall Clark offers his own views, and reports on the surrounding community debate. 05/12/2004

By Itamar Shtull-Trauring
The syntaxes used in protocols should be simple and consistent, says Itamar Shtull-Trauring. He examines the good, the bad, and the ugly. 04/21/2004

By Rich Salz
In his latest column Rich Salz begins to discuss the implementation of a web service for doing key management with the W3C's X-KRSS standard. 11/25/2003

By Ivelin Ivanov
Though not yet a W3C Recommendation, XQuery has been around for a long time now. This article looks at the trends in its deployment, and predicts the big opportunity for XQuery in web services integration. 10/01/2003

By Anish Karmarkar
The WS-I Basic Profile is a set of guidelines on using web services specifications to maximize interoperability. This article from a WS-I BP working group member previews the changes to the Basic Profile being incorporated in the 1.1 revision of the specification. 09/16/2003

By Rich Salz
In his latest column Rich Salz discusses the grassroots weblog API, variously known as "Atom" and "Echo", and makes substantive suggestions for how it should be changed to use SOAP. 08/05/2003

By Sergey Beryozkin
Saving state in web services interactions is an important capability. This article reviews the various approaches to maintaining sessions in web services. 07/22/2003

By Bilal Siddiqui
In this fourth and final part of our series on web services security, we put all the pieces together to demonstrate how the XML Signature, XML encryption, Web Services Security, and SAML specifications work together. 07/22/2003

By Kendall Grant Clark
Kendall Grant Clark discusses BPEL4WS, DAML-S, WS-Choreography, and the likelihood that BPEL4WS will be the only high-level way of describing composite web services.  07/08/2003

By Johan Peeters
In the second part of his hands-on WSDL series, Johan Peeters clarifies good practice for writing WSDL, and also finds that WSDL itself is not yet mature enough. 06/24/2003

By Paul Madsen
WS-Trust is a proposal that enables security token interoperability by defining a request/response protocol for SOAP actors to request of some trusted authority that a particular security token be exchanged for another. Paul Madsen provides a detailed explanation of the WS-Trust technology. 06/24/2003

By Rich Salz
Rich Salz returns to the Web Services columnist field by introducing us to SOAP 1.2, about which Rich is understandably optimistic. 06/10/2003

By Faheem Khan
In the third and final part of our series on web services transactions, Faheem Kham examines the WS-Transaction spec's Business Activities, a way of handling long lived collections of transactions. 05/27/2003

By Bilal Siddiqui
This article discusses XML-based authentication and the sharing of authentication information across different applications, known as Single Sign-on. The Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) from OASIS provides expression in XML of authentication information. 05/13/2003

By Faheem Khan
In the second installment of our series on web service transactions, Faheem Khan examines in detail the operation of atomic transactions in an example enterprise application scenario, using the WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction specifications. 04/29/2003

By Faheem Khan
This first article in three part series describing transactional web services introduces the service oriented architecture, federation of web services, and the need for coordination and transactions. 04/15/2003

By Pim van der Eijk
The ebXML Messaging Service specification (ebMS) extends the SOAP specification to provide the security and reliability features required by many production enterprise and e-business applications.  03/18/2003

By Rich Salz
Rich Salz introduces the Web Services Interoperability Organization, and its Basic Profile, in his first column for the new WebServices.XML.com site. 03/04/2003

This white paper discusses the architectural issues encountered when using opaque non-XML data in XML applications, including (but not limited to) Web services and SOAP. 02/26/2003

By Rich Salz
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz explains what security means in the context of web services, as well as explaining the signing and encrypting of SOAP messages. 01/15/2003

By Randy J. Ray
The initial reference to overloading in the WSDL 1.1 specification is limited, a situation that left many new users of WSDL unsure where to turn to for clarification. Randy Ray, coauthor of Programming Web Services with Perl sheds light on the issue by explaining how to express overloaded interfaces in WSDL.  01/08/2003

By Rich Salz
In this month's XML Endpoints column, Rich Salz offers guidance for migrating from XML-RPC to SOAP by creating a SOAP profile with which XML-RPC can interoperate. 12/18/2002

By Bilal Siddiqui
In the second and final article of his series on XML Canonicalization, Bilal Siddiqui shows how to cope with documents that have CDATA sections, processing instructions, external entity references and comments. 10/09/2002

By Bilal Siddiqui
Bilal Siddiqui explains the process of canonicalizing XML documents, useful in determining the logical equivalence of documents in order to secure XML exchanges. 09/18/2002

By Rich Salz
In this month's Endpoints column, Rich Salz describes the DIME, a binary message format, and WS-Attachements specifications. 09/18/2002

By Rich Salz
In this month's XML Endpoints column, Rich Salz explains how to process SOAP headers and why you'd want to. Along the way he predicts the demise of SAX-based SOAP processors. 07/17/2002

By Kendall Grant Clark
Kendall Grant Clark investigates the DAML-Services ontology, which ties together web services with the semantic web and could well play a key part in the web of the future. 07/17/2002

By Rich Salz
In Rich Salz's second XML Endpoints column, he uses Python to demonstrate generating SOAP code for talking to Google's web service. 06/12/2002

By Rael Dornfest, Clay Shirky
A brief look at the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and its role as the de facto standard Web Services description format. 05/01/2002

By Paul Prescod
Paul Prescod explains why moving its API to use SOAP was a backward step for the popular search engine, and argues for a return to a pure HTTP and XML interface. 04/24/2002

By Rael Dornfest, Clay Shirky
A brief look at the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and its role as the de facto standard Web Services messaging format. 04/16/2002

By Clay Shirky
This executive summary from O'Reilly Research's report, "Planning for Web Services," gives a high level overview of the promises and pitfalls of web services. 04/12/2002

By Rael Dornfest
A brief look at WebDAV -- Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. 03/26/2002

By Rael Dornfest
A brief look at Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer networking framework. 03/12/2002

By Pavel Kulchenko
The coauthor of Programming Web Services with SOAP presents a quick guide to the protocols and the specifications behind more than 20 acronyms related to Web services, from SOAP to XLANG, including a description of how they relate to each other and where each sits on the Web services landscape. 01/09/2002

By Timothy Ewald, Martin Gudgin
Our web services columnists reckon the WSDL interface language needs more work and try to engage the assistance of Santa Claus in their quest. 12/19/2001

By Timothy Ewald, Martin Gudgin
This month's Endpoints column describes SOAP 1.1, its header extensibility mechanism, and possible changes in SOAP 1.2. 10/17/2001

By Timothy Ewald, Martin Gudgin
XML.com's newest column, XML Endpoints, which is devoted to exploring web services, debuts by asking what a web service really is and what it shouldn't be. 09/12/2001

By Alan Kotok
Our report on the latest happenings in ebXML covers their adoption of SOAP, and takes stock as ebXML nears the end of its project. 04/04/2001

By Venu Vasudevan
A review of the emerging XML-based web services platform, examining the core components of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. 04/04/2001

By Didier Martin
Our intrepid explorer of specifications, Didier Martin, investigates CC/PP, an RDF application for describing and exchanging device capabilities. 01/31/2001

By C.M. Sperberg-McQueen
This report from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on the development of XML-related specifications highlights the diverse paths that XML has taken since its invention a few years ago. 01/03/2001

By Leigh Dodds
Jon Bosak's comments at XML 2000 about the respective roles of ebXML and SOAP have sparked discussion on convergence between ebXML's transport, routing and packaging layer and the W3C's XML Protocol Activity. 12/20/2000

By Didier Martin
Ever written a "Hello World" program that talks back? Didier Martin has, and now he shares his experiences in order to show us around VoiceXML, a markup language for voice interactions. 09/06/2000

By Edd Dumbill
In this speech to the XML World 2000 conference in Boston, XML.com Editor Edd Dumbill gives an overview of the integrated future of XML and the Web, and the role that SOAP and RDF will play in that vision. 09/06/2000

By Alan Kotok
The fourth meeting of the Electronic Business XML working group sees the intiative make good progress. But will the group be able to meet its self-imposed 18-month deadline? 08/16/2000

By Alan Kotok
Since our first survey of XML business vocabularies in February this year, the number of entries in our tables has more than doubled, highlighting the large push forward in vertical and cross-industry standardization activity. 08/02/2000

By Edd Dumbill
XML has found many applications in the news industry for overcoming the challenges posed by the Web. This article examines the technologies, and looks at the future of news syndication with XML. 07/17/2000

By Leigh Dodds
The XML-DEV mailing list has seen a renewed vigor in discussion recently, with the spotlight being turned on the troubled issue of XML Schemas. 07/12/2000

By Edd Dumbill
David Orchard of Jamcracker spoke about the rise of XML/HTTP messaging on the final morning of XML DevCon 2000. 06/28/2000

By Alan Kotok
A recent meeting of the ebXML initiative was able to demonstrate proof-of-concept technology of some of its early specifications. A third of the way through its allotted 18-month timetable, ebXML has made definite progress, but still has a long way to go. 05/24/2000

By Edd Dumbill
Although the XML Protocols Shakedown Panel at WWW9 in Amsterdam last week clarified the positions of the various participants, the session did not result in any clear consensus. 05/24/2000

By Edd Dumbill
 10/27/1999

By Dale Dougherty
The ICE 1.0 specification describes a transaction protocol for syndicated content distribution. 10/29/1998

By Victor Votsch
Things have been busy in April for the Information and Content Exchange (ICE) consortium led by Vignette. 04/22/1998

By Victor Votsch
Syndicating content on the Web should become much easier from a production standpoint as a result of a new consortium of vendors and publishers. 03/10/1998

By Charles Allen
The problem of direct access to Web data from within business applications has until recently been largely ignored. The Web Interface Definition Language (WIDL) is an application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allows the resources of the World Wide Web to be described as functional interfaces that can be accessed by remote systems over standard Web protocols. 10/02/1997