Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote: > On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 18:49 +0100, Stefan Tilkov wrote: > > I agree that none of them is standardized yet, which doesn't prevent > > anyone from using them in their own applications, but hinders tool > > development (which can be considered a disadvantage). > > Its more than tool support: what matters on the Web is > *interoperability*. If I publish a service and it requires reliability > to work well, I should be able to publish an interoperable protocol that > a client from VB to C to Java to Cobol can do. The only way to do that > is to have standards that all vendors support.
The support for multiple languages and programming environments has fewer and fewer advantages in the long run. Practically, XML content in WS-* and elsewhere is growing semantic meaning which is making it into a mobile code, platform in and of itself. In the long run, the industry will slowly push more symantics into XML as the true value of mobile code becomes more visible. As this happens, we will slowly move to a mostly tool based programming environment where all the arguments about the "readability of java" will be a distant memory as we argue about the inability to read what the tools have generated, at all. > That's the real challenge for REST. Remember that there's nothing new in > REST- its been around for 15+ years and has worked great for the Web. > Saying its the silver bullet for integration is a bit of a stretch when > many of the core needs of integration are not met by the technology. > Whether you like the details or not, they *are* met by WS-* stuff. There's nothing new in XML either. It represents nothing more than was possible with Lisp. The issue from my perspective is how the ignorance of computer science evolution and development is continously ignored by Microsoft. Instead of using things that the computer science world has already developed, they continously create churn and waste of time, resources and money requiring people to reinvent existing technologies to align with their platform. I'm not really an MS basher. But, it's really difficult to see how we've progressed over the years. Microsoft's sole interest is dominance and profitability. This is clear in every message put forth by their actions and participation in the industry. SOA is now all about who can make their platforms which have worked together for decades finally work with the standard that microsoft has chosen to create. What this creates is churn on the part of everyone else. Microsoft is holding the reigns on everyone elses activities. They're directing your actions, controlling your cost of business and making sure that they continue to be in a controlling position. This is one of the more predominate reasons why I still think that the Java platform has far more value in managing this control than anyone really seems to appreciate. Many feel that the use of XML/SOAP/WS-* means that you truely have more choices than before. You can pick the programming language/platform etc. But that's by far the smallest impact on the industry. We've made those choices for years and allowed various companies and standards organizations to direct the development of a wide variety of RPC/messaging standards. None of those standards have ever been able to solve all the problems that developers/architects have encountered. Thus the continued development of more and more protocols/transports/transfer mechanisms. In the end, it's the power of mobile code that provides the tools which go beyond the protocol and application level. We've had an available standard in the industry for 10+ years that provided a multi-OS, mobile code platform. Yet Microsoft chose not to play well in that interaction with the industry either. I guess we'll all just get to set back and watch as all the vendors make the decision of whether they'll keep following microsofts lead, or choose to really drive SOA towards good, flexible solutions for more environments. Gregg Wonderly
