I’ve been spending a fair bit of my morning reading posts in “complexity of SOA” fray and it caused me to wonder, really, how many WS-* standards (approved or in the works) are there? First place I thought to look turned out to be the winner: Wikipedia has what is presumably a current list of web services specifications (which I originally got to through the redirected WS-* address). Wow – even more than I expected. To save you the trouble of counting, here are my stats:

• Total: 61 (!!!)
• WS-*: 36 (6 of which are draft specifications)
• Categories: 12 *

* Directory Access, Service Description, Messaging and Function Calls, Basic Profile Specifications, Business Process Specifications, Security Specifications, Reliable Messaging Specifications, Transaction Specifications, Publish-subscribe Messaging Specifications, Basic XML Specifications, Other.Okay, I knew it was bad but this is utter ludicracy!