Clickstream

SOAP and WS-* : This is Never Going to Work

Not going to work. May as well call WS-* Death-* since that's where it appears to be headed. I've had my head in the sand with "enterprise" web work, doing REST APIs and such, so I surfaced a couple months ago and looked at all this WS-* SOA stuff and also Java stacks/platforms. They make my brain hurt.

All this reminds me of the days of CORBA and object request brokers and how the world would be saved by all this magical interoperability. After a dozen years it almost worked, so we moved on to SOAP which begat WSDL which begat UDDI and together they spawned WS-KitchenSink.

We now have WS-I: Web Services Interoperability. A standard to define interoperability of standards in the WS-* arena because the standards aren't standard enough. Joy! Sure is reminiscent of the early 90's when I gave up on C++ and transaction processing monitors and CORBA and focused on databases and data integration.

I'm glad I've been ignoring the enterprisey web services stuff and paying more attention to how real work gets done in a web 2.0 world. Hopefully the RESTian people will borrow the good bits of WS-* and move everything forward. Seems to be working well enough outside the enterprise where issues WS-* is supposed to address are potentially tougher than inside the enterprise.

Labels: CORBA, REST, SOA, SOAP, web service

Posted by Mark Friday, November 09, 2007 8:52:00 PM | permalink |