ebXML and Web services

The World Wide Web Consortium´s Web Service Architecture Group is developing a formal Web services architecture (WSA). The recently published WSA working draft identifies the architecture´s essential functional blocks and their interrelationships, and endorses SOAP and WSDL as the fundamental technologies required to claim WSA-conformance. ebXML is a top-down effort to standardize the B2B-integration environment. We offer an overview of the WSA and ebXML, followed by a detailed comparison of each technology´s messaging layer functions using the WSA´s conceptual architecture (CA) as a criteria for comparison. Although messaging is only one of the CA´s three major blocks (along with description and discovery), we focus on it here because current Web services technologies are the most mature in this area. A detailed comparison of its messaging function with that of bottom-up Web services reveals considerable common ground.