netzooid

Bill de Hora touched on some topics today that I find deserving of more thought:

WS-* as a process, as a technical means designing systems , as a way to generate ‘future business value’ now lacks credibility. This has less to the do with the technology involved and more to do with how the technology has be presented to the market, and consequently how it has evolved.

I completely agree that the way WS-* has evolved has been less than ideal. Part of this is probably just 20/20 hindsight. But contrast the WS-* process to Open ID which seems to have developed from a real simple need and a real implementation within LiveJournal into a standard with a lot of vendor support (hopefully this summary is somewhat accurate). Where as your typical WS-Foo spec has been developed by a committee trying to support every possible use case (granted there is a big quality spectrum here across the different specs, some are much better than others).

I think that people make the mistake of completely writing off WS-* because they assume that the motivations are bad (its those evil vendors!). Yet there are real use cases motivating many of these standards. If people really want to see WS-* go away, they need to start addressing these needs within a web architecture. Or as Bill writes in the comments: “I think we need to talk about how “REST as in the HTTP Web, sucks”, before it becomes another silver bullet. There are definite issues.”

But I think the more important point here is how WS-* presented to market. As Bill says, one of the big issues is that it is marketed as a solution which abstract our problems away. A way to align IT and business!

The problem is that solving and implementing solutions for these problems is just hard in general. Whether you choose WS-* or a RESTful solution, you’re still going to have to worry about performance, scalability, reliability, transactions, etc. I think if you look at the WS-* standards as a way to add complimentary features and support additional use cases (for instance, message level security or security token exchange), you end up with a much more realistic picture than if you view WS-* as abstracting away all your architectual issues. There are different ways to solve these problems of course, but none of them are a silver bullet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Random.