In a recent interview, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole criticizes appserver vendors for convincing people you need fancy orchestration and transaction mangement services (of an appplication server) to build service oriented architectures/web services. He also claims that javascript is all you need to maintaining workflow and transactional integrity.
That’s right kids. All you really need to host web services are a box and some free software. You can put together XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST services with Perl or Python through CGI. You can run Apache Axis on top of Tomcat or another free server. Things don’t need to be as thick or as complicated as you are making it. Take a step back and stop spending so much money.