5. Publication and syndication

Alternatives to SOAP/WSDI exist for publishing information and Web services. Also based on XML, these publishing and syndication protocols - of which RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) and Atom have become the most popular – formats, particularly for news feeds and blogs – - provide a "light" infrastructure that can also be put to good use for enterprise Web applications. These protocols rely solely on the underlying Web protocols HTTP and XML, illustrating a different approach to Web services architecture, known as REST (REpresentational State Transfer), positioned by its proponents as functionally comparable to, but far less cumbersome than, the instances of SOA architecture proposed by the W3C and OASIS.