Interoperability issues in accessing databases through web services

XML and Web Services provide basic data interoperability today. Web Services, as a distributed application technology, simplifies interoperability between heterogeneous distributed systems. Toolkit interoperability means that we can write Web Service code in one toolkit and easily consume it using another toolkit without dropping down to the lower-level XML APIs. Toolkit interoperability is harder to achieve due to the many differences in programming languages, and because there exists no standard XML Schema definition for representing database resultsets. The .NET DataSet is one type that presents interesting challenges to toolkit interoperability. In this paper we present a method for using a .NET DataSet to consume a WebRowSet object provided by a JAX-WS Web Service, without using XML APIs directly.