1. Technical developments :

1.1 From XML to Web services

The revolutionary characteristics (universality and ubiquity) of the Internet and the Web represent a further step in the evolution that has already led, in the space of a few decades, from the monolithic mainframe application, via client-server and three-tier architecture, to distributed object assemblies (Corba, DCOM and EJB) and their application servers. But while the links in this chain were successively built on protocols, languages and interfaces that were progressively richer and more refined, open or jealously proprietary,...