Using Web Services in Business-to-Business Integration

The Web services paradigm promises well for the future of Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi). Currently, however, this paradigm is still in its infancy and organizations investing in Web services are facing many challenges. In this chapter we discuss some important B2Bi issues and examine how Web services could play their part in these. Nowadays, many Web services standards are being drawn up, but most of these are still immature and do not fully answer the proposed challenges. This chapter presents some rather mature standards. The goal of the authors is to show the importance of a flexible and cheap integration technology, and to discuss how the idea behind Web services fits in this vision, as well as to clarify the role of some important Web services standards.