Like most people, I get really busy around the holidays and I fell off the blogging wagon. But I'm getting back on it, starting with this post wishing all a Happy New Year! That said, here are the big topics I was thinking about over the holidays...
Like many people, I've been thinking about what's going to happen in the WS space this year. While progress on standardizing WS-* continues, it doesn't seem possible that it would be complete by the time major vendors ship support (only WS-Security has completed the process and from the looks of things WS-Addressing is going to take a while). I think the standardization process is pretty important; it found enough issues with SOAP, WS-Sec, and WS-Addr to suggest that it's worthwhile (WSDL 2 being the major argument against).
But like many pragmatists, I don't care about standards nearly as much as I care about software that offers the features I want. That said, I don't know whether I want a lot of the features that vendors are offering. I keep wondering whether WS-* will repeat the process of COM+ and J2EE, where people invested a lot of time and money only to discover that the basic technology - SOAP, WSDL - was all they really needed. Certainly with Amazon and EBay making money hand-over-fist using basic Web services (or even XML over HTTP), it's hard to argue that you need all of WS-* to successfully reach a business goal.
My prediction is that security enhancements and collaboration - building systems that use multiple services (which could be called orchestration, if that wasn't tied to BPEL in the minds of many) - will be the big features for developers this year. That and of course figuring out how to write schemas that others can use and how to version services in a reasonable way using the toolkits they have today.
Posted
Jan 14 2005, 09:48 AM
by
tim-ewald