Tradeoffs in web services design

While designing web services, we encounter many trade-offs. A good discussion of these trade-offs is provided in a report prepared by Web Services and Practices working group at National Information Standards Organization (NISO). This report, named Best Practices for Designing Web Services in the Library Context discusses following trade-offs:

• Complexity levels vs. expandability
• Amount of data returned levels vs. performance speed
• Audience levels vs. service interface size
• Performance levels vs. number of operations

The report also discusses different models involved in fully describing or documenting a web service interface and provides some useful best practices.