Web Services are widely heralded as a step to the next generation of computing and a basis for resolving integration, one of the largest IT challenges. Web Services have much to learn from the development of database management systems (DBMSs) and the DBMS community has much to contribute to realizing Web Services. Web Services have much to learn from the failures of previous Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). In the 1980s, several distributed computing proposals emerged including the open software foundation's distributed computing environment (DCE), the object management group's (OMG's) common object request broker architecture (CORBA), Microsoft's distributed component object model (DCOM), as well as several distributed DBMS prototypes and products. These distributed computing proposals where part of the widely accepted notion of an SOA based on modularization, encapsulation, and re-use in which services could be invoked remotely and transparently across a distributed computing environment.
