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2/11/2002 9:15:41 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:
>This is a push to get to production with "good enough" specs
>and tech.
Does this seem like a problem to you? Whatever one thinks about the
current Web Services hype vis a vis what we think we've learned about the
web architecture, and whatever one thinks about "good is best" vs "best is
best", what options do the WS-I participants have other than working
together in something like the WS-I? All they're doing (according to the
interview) is define profiles of the various specs (at least Lewin doesn't
call them "standards") that people want to actually use, build best
practices guidelines for using them in an interoperable way, and build
test suites.
The alternative of waiting for the "real" standards bodies (or
theorists/researchers) to do this is simply not an option that one could
advocate and keep one's job, I would guess. Hype is a cruel master, and
it is applying the whip and saying "row faster." Most of us here know that
the SOAP bubble is inflating faster than the reality behind it. If the Web
Services advocates pursue the vision (theoretically flawed though it may
be) in a coordinated way, at least we will KNOW what when wrong when the
bubble bursts. If they do it willy-nilly in a quasi-proprietary way, we
won't know (in a few years) if the bubble burst because the idea was
doomed or because the execution was shoddy.
Somewhat more optimistically, the Web Services vision has a better chance
of becoming a near-term reality with coordination being done by an
organization with a totally pragmatic charter rather than one of defining
long-term standards or "leading the web to its full potential." It's quite
possible that necessary adjustments to the vision (such as deprecating RPC
and using more scalable and robust message exchange patterns) can be done
without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but this requires a
process with much tighter feedback loops than the W3C or ISO has these
days.
The Web needs a) short-run pragmatic coordination among fierce rivals; b)
longer-term architectural planning and integration; and c) Rigorous
standardization of the technologies that prove their value. Perhaps in
the SGML era, the ISO did all three. The W3C evolved to fill role a) in
its early years, then matured to focus on b). That leaves role a)
unfilled, and the WS-I was invented to fill it. Of course, people who
want to avoid the chaos of living in Internet Time should stay away from
the WS-I until it produces something, and support "real" standards efforts
from in a revitalized ISO activity and/or maturing W3C activities.
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