It seems like the more work that is done to simplify Web services standardization, the more confusing it gets. Web services is supposed to provide for easy communications between systems based on a set of industry-standard technologies. But the plethora of standards proposed for Web services is a bit hard to follow. This week, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Computer Associates got behind the Microsoft-driven WS-Eventing specification supporting publish-and-subscribe Web services functionality. But IBM still touts its own rival WS-Notification specs as its preferred route while saying the company will enable interoperability with WS-Eventing. IBM wrote, “WS-Eventing specification provides similar functionality to that of WS-BaseNotification. WS-BaseNotification is one of the WS-Notification specifications that were submitted to an OASIS [technical committee] in April 2004.”Following all this is enough to make your head spin, with Web services specifications, sometimes redundant, competing ones, proposed to resolve issues such as addressing, management, publish-and-subscribe events, security and business process orchestration. Perhaps the most famous ones were the dueling Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) specification proposed by Microsoft and IBM and the Web Services Choreography Interfaces (WSCI) proposal from Sun. BEA Systems was involved in both proposals. (BPEL appears to have won the battle).Just look at the front page of the OASIS Web site and you will find listed many Web services standardization proposals, including Web Services for Remote Portlets, Web Services Reliable Messaging, Web Services Notification, Web Services Distributed Management, etc. There must be a way to simplify all this because it surely is going to be a tough task for vendors and enterprises to support all this complexity in the name of simplicity Technology Industry