As an early adopter of web services technology Prometric, a part of the Thomson Corporation, has experienced the pain and anguish caused by the failure of current vendor solutions to deliver truly interoperable SOAP web services.

The focus of current tool sets on generating WSDL from class/object hierarchies has potentially hindered the interoperability. This presentation will focus on the design first, build later best practice that is consistent across the field of software development but seems to be lacking in the field of web service integration. Proposing several approaches to interface design and creation, rather than reliance on vendor specific generators, real world examples of interoperability failures will be used to illuminate darker side of web services.