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The list omits WS-Events and WS-Eventing which are "competitors"
to WS-Notification. (Note: I think WS-Eventing may have been dropped, but
WS-Events still appears to live.)
The whole Web Services space is one that is based more on hope
than any real evidence of success. There are dozens of companies that have
invested heavily in this space and thousands of individuals who have tied
their hopes to the idea of Web Services. The mere fact that nothing useful
seems to be coming out of the expenditure of all this energy doesn't seem
to have dimmed the desire to make it happen.
But, the basic ideas behind Web Services are really great!
Distributed applications are, in fact, a really wonderful idea. They were
back when we first started implementing them seriously back in the early
80's and they still are today. The idea of having standard interchange
formats and describing your interfaces with formal definition languages
like WSDL is also a good one that has been well proven over time. ASN.1,
CORBA IDL, many RPC interfaces, XML, and, of course, lots of IETF and ISO
standards have validated these ideas. We should also be particularly
supportive of the attention that the WS-* folk give to reuse of standards.
The mere fact that they seem to insist on defining new standards before
they are willing to reuse them should not take away from our appreciation
of their appreciation of reuse as a concept.
Finally, it should be noted that the really great thing about the
WS space is that it is *really* easy to put together a working group and
get your very own personal WS-* specification written and announced as a
standard. The traditional standards forums (ISO, IETF, etc.) are much more
difficult to work through and result in much greater sharing of the credit
than is typical of the groups that get WS-* stuff written up. The other
thing that is nice about WS-* stuff is that since there aren't many
working examples of the stuff, it is really easy to present one's self as
an "expert" without having to deal with the embarrasment of failed or
competitive implementations. (If a standard is never deployed, noone can
*really* say if it is any good...) All of these factors and others tend to
produce an environment which is very attractive to individuals and
companies who seek to feel like they are leaders on the bleeding edge.
There are few areas in our business today that can offer so much personal
reward and so much press coverage in return for so little useful output.
bob wyman
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 3:04 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org DEV
Subject: [xml-dev] WS-Emperor naked?
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?
-Tim
smime.p7s
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