On Dec 12, 2006, at 6:10 AM, Gervas Douglas wrote: > This thread I opened has triggered a major campaign in the REST vs. > WS wars that rage across this Group sporadically. This time I feel > that we are seeing some very constructive debate with a genuine > interest to engage with what the other side offers (well at least > in one direction J). So what provisional conclusions can we > reach? I would suggest: > > · In contrast to 3 years or so ago when we had the great > CORBA vs. WS wars, I think we can conclude that CORBA has entered > the legacy stage of its lifecycle. I would be most interested to > hear from any dissenters of that opinion! I'll bite. You can never make a statement like that about CORBA, or any other technology for that matter, without also specifying the market of which you speak. I'd agree there are markets where CORBA has entered the legacy stage of its lifecycle, but at the same time there are other markets where CORBA is viewed as being relatively new. For example, in the Asia-Pacific market, CORBA is quite popular. It's been years since I spoke about CORBA in the US, Europe, or Australia, yet I now get several requests each month to go to China to talk about CORBA. CORBA is also currently getting significant attention in embedded and real-time software markets, which are traditionally much more conservative than business IT markets. Indeed, most of the work on evolving CORBA in the OMG these days occurs in the real-time/embedded working groups. > · WS has overwhelming support from the vendor community, > particularly the big boys. > > · REST looks intriguing and has inspired some firebrand > evangelists. However it seems unlikely to blow WS into the ditch > anytime soon. Note that the same concept I explain above also partly explains the current raging REST debate on this list. A lot of the discussion over the past week or so has centered around direct comparisons of SOA and REST in the context of enterprise integration, but such an apples-to- apples comparison isn't wholly meaningful because each approach is at a very different phase of its lifecycle in the enterprise integration market.
I recommend reading [1] for more information. --steve [1] <http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem. 9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp? &pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/past_issues/0409/ d&file=w5tow.xml&xsl=article.xsl&> or <http://www.iona.com/hyplan/vinoski/pdfs/IEEE- Is_Your_Middleware_Dead.pdf> (PDF)
