RE: Debating on the usefulness of supporting a) Stateful Web Service Instances b) Stateful Interaction

Mark,
> 
> b) is less obvious, but most Web services interfaces I've seen are
> stateful.  I believe this is attributable to the simple fact that it
> takes effort to design stateless interfaces, whereas stateful
interfaces
> are the default.
> 

I would argue that SOA says nothing about the statefulness of the
services exposed through an interface. I agree that most of the Web
services have to maintain some state behind the scenes in order to be of
any use but the semantics of SOA do not mandate that (at least that's my
understanding).

.savas.