standardized WS-* (reprise)

some more info about the standards of WS-*

I enjoyed this article which pretended to be about REST vs. SOAP web services, but seemed more in the end to be about WS-* specs. it also pointed out that J2EE is dependent on CORBA! I'm surprised the .NET crew has not jumped on this factoid to hammer J2EE as a WS platform. I probably need to research it in full before I make that a marketing device of lamp5's, but since I've already gotten some good ammo against J2EE, what I really need is some argumentation against .NET, if anyone has some, other than MS-style FUD, let me know.

But the article made a good point about the WS-* specifications and their issues being more related to vendor politics than technical problems. This was supposedly to regain a point for SOAP-based WS as opposed to REST, since apparently the REST camp has used WS-* confusion as an argument against SOAP-based WS.

I also heard back from Erl about the nature of WS-* specifications and he answered in a relatively vendor-neutral way that standards orgs like W3C and OASIS take a long time to get standards approved by their committees. many companies need the functionality up and going in a certain schedule, so they write their own standards specifications, using their own resources, and make the standards "open." W3C or OASIS may come along and endorse one of these vendor standards, or it may make its own, but I think it's ultimately not a good thing to have over-lapping "standards" in the long run.

It may only happen when someone needs to develop WS that consume or provide that certain functionality, and that's not as bad as having, say, a vendor-specific XML standard, but I think it would help to settle on a standard in a shorter time frame. though competing standards for a time would make sure the good standards come out. this all may just be a political nightmare that I don't want to get involved in, and hopefully these few posts will be the last I think/discuss it.