Vendor-pires
Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*;
The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors.
Ah, there we are; major vendors. What she’s basically saying here is that if you’re silly enough to have invited one of these vampires into your home, you’ll have the option of selecting other vampires to replace them at will, and that your vampire will be able to talk with your neighbors’ — when they’re not fighting weird, ritualistic vampire fights.
Show me the interoperable, full and free implementations of WS-* in Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP. You won’t see them, because there’s no intrinsic value in WS-* unless you’re trying to suck money out of your customers. Its complexity serves as a barrier to entry at the same time that it creates “value” that can be sold.
She goes on;
WS-* also has some really interesting innovations (separation of header and body, the composability of the various SOAP extensions, policy-based management and control via intermediaries, etc), which I think make it particularly well-suited for enterprise-class service-oriented application systems.
Hi Anne. I was there too, and most of these “innovations” are vapourware. Intermediaries in SOAP are a pipe dream, and almost useless as specified; WS-Policy is a complete shot in the dark. Composibility is something they think they can prove by assertion, and having headers isn’t exactly rocket science.
I’ve got an opportunity to talk to the W3C Advisory Committee about these things in a couple of weeks. One of the main problems that I have is figuring out how deep the vendor-pires are in that organisation; if they’ve infected everyone else and made it the Enterprise-Wide Web Consortium, I don’t hold much hope for it.