Methods, apparatuses and systems facilitating the support of stateful messaging protocols in web services and other network environments comprising a plurality of distributed control points. The present invention supports Web service protocols, such as SOAP-Conversation, that introduce an element of statefulness into a Web service invocation, ensuring that use of such protocols is enabled and, in some embodiments, enhanced in web services networks implemented by a plurality of distributed control points or routing nodes. As discussed above, a fundamental requirement introduced by stateful protocols is that, once an endpoint initializes stateful data (such as a session, context, or conversation token) in response to a Web service invocation, all subsequent messages associated with that conversation instance or stateful data must be routed to that endpoint. In other words, the consuming applications requiring access to functionality dependent on stateful data must have an affinity for the endpoint on which the state data resides for as long as the dependency persists. The invention provides methods, apparatuses and systems directed to ensuring that the control points implement this affinity. For each stateful conversation, certain embodiments of the present invention maintain a set of routing rules that track the usage of such protocols and make sure sequences of messages that must be sent to the same endpoint are properly dispatched. The present invention can be applied to a variety of web- or application-service network architectures comprising a plurality of distributed control points or routing nodes.