Comments on: Two Web Services Questions (what actually works?)

By: G Roper

G Roper — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:51:29 +0000

I rarely see a WS-* implementation and they’re each fraught with problems. But I do see literally thousands of RESTful web services on the WWW.

WS-* is unfortunately a stillborn set of standards: it will find use only in limited environments (intranets, etc.). CORBA redux is what happens when committees try to design standards with which they have no experience and/or for which no practices exist.

By: Mark Baker

Mark Baker — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 20:02:46 +0000

Mike – empirical evidence is wonderful to have of course, but it’s also extraordinarily costly to come by. It’s also unnecessary, since we’ve had at our disposal for years (since Perry & Wolf’s “Foundations” paper in the early 90s) a method of evaluating software architectural styles for their suitability for any particular task in any particular environment. Applying that method to SOA/WS tells us a number things, most importantly that it doesn’t scale across trust boundaries (which I’ve been saying for many years, and folks now seem to be acknowledging viz a viz WS use behind the firewall). That same method also tells us which other styles do (ones that adopt interface constraints, of which REST is just one example). This whole debate is not much more complicated than that.

By: Mike Champion

Mike Champion — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:44:36 +0000

Strongly agree! FWIW I’m just as frustrated with the WS-* / SOA people going higher and higher up the abstraction stack when the question of qho is actually doing what that works how well comes up, as I am with the RESTifarians who say that all would be just fine if you used the Web as it was intended to be used, but nobody does because of [various nefarious reasons here]. Show us the WS-* success stories, show us the secure, reliable and truly RESTifarian success stories, and let the world judge from the evidence.

Hint hint — I’m sure I speak for David in suggesting that XML 2006 would be a very appropriate venue for such reports / analyses.