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On Apr 2, 2004, at 3:04 PM, Tim Bray wrote:
> Would anyone here like to argue that the list found in
>
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/04/01/WS-Mumble
>
> is coherent, or sensible, or viable, or generally that the parrot is
> not dead?
>
The list is woefully incomplete; the emperor has far more imaginary
jewels on his costume than you list :-) See
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2004Feb/0022.html and
http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?WebServicesSpecifications
for more. Bill de Hora has an RSS feed with updates at
http://www.dehora.net/rss/wsasf-rss10.xml
I dunno ... having not had to worry about this since the W3C axed the
WS Arch group. The parrot is squawking pretty loudly; I don't think
he's dead. On the other hand, he's not singing sweet melodies in
harmony with the other parrots (hmm, I don't think parrots ever do
that, but who am I to miss the opportunity to beat a metaphor to
death?). There are a lot of problems chasing web services solutions,
solutions chasing real problems, and monopolists looking for a way to
stifle the competition in this space. It's ugly.
So, IMHO it's not even remotely sensible; on the other hand I think the
chaos is a sign of vitality rather than a death struggle. As with most
everything, there is a small subset of this stuff that really and truly
works, and lots of real enterprises are using SOAP and WSDL (and of
course HTTP and XML) for integration projects. The much-maligned UDDI
is coming to its own as a way of managing enterprise metadata about all
sorts of stuff, including web services. I've never heard of any of our
customers (mostly big organizations with lots of big iron) making more
than polite inquiries about the WS-* stack, but they're mostly doing
this behind the firewall and over proprietary MOM transports, so
security, reliability, transactions, etc. are not a WS issue yet.
There is a LOT of pent-up demand for WS-Security so that this stuff can
work in B2B scenarios without having to agree on the security
infrastructure a priori. I would bet (not the farm, but a modest chunk
of a paycheck) that BPMN and BPEL are going to emerge from the vapor
pretty soon, but there are already some cracks showing in in the facade
of unity (e.g. BPELJ).
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