Document-style Web Services support document-centric applications - applications which exchange and process documents described by a wide range of schemas and which are much larger and more complex than a SOAP-RPC payload. Document-style Web Services prove to be the best solution for a wide range of usage scenarios in b2b and may be more suitable for applications which do not easily reduce to service invocations at the granularity of RPC or are beset by some the performance challenges largely implicit in the remote procedure model.

Several techniques are presented for implementing an efficient and reliable document-centric Web Services framework: use of a manifest for ensuring message integrity and optimizing message processing; efficient parsing strategies for SOAP mesages with large document payloads and/or attachments; use of a uniform document framework unifying document representations and supporting "lazy evaluation"; a comprehensive model for intramessage references; and the use of generated XML schema APIs to enable rapid programming of document-centric Web Services applications.

An open-source Java toolkit that the authors have developed, the DocSOAP XDK is presented. The DocSOAP XDK's implementation of many of the critical features needed in a high-performance, reliable SOAP framework is described. Finally, the authors propose a list of action items for fostering the widespread use of document-centric Web Services.