Web Services Explained, Solutions and Applications for the Real World

If you've browsed some recent articles in the popular trade press on the topic of Web services, you may have noticed several common themes:

• The Web services battle is really a Microsoft .NET versus Sun Java event.

• Microsoft has the marketing lead while Sun is having trouble getting its act together.

• Hewlett-Packard is way late to the fray.

• BEA is losing market share to IBM.

Let's take a close look at some of these themes.