Web services are widely adopted ???

Eric,

I have collected a few snippets from your previous posts.

<eric>
Criticisms founded on purely technical grounds or on the subject of
"architectural purity" completely miss the point of what we need to do.  At
the end of the day, marketplace acceptance is the only measure that matters
for a standard, and the current Web services have been widely adopted.
...
The purpose of my email was to highlight the significance of factors outside
of technical and architectural purity.  Part of the argument I often hear
about REST is that it has succeeded, therefore it's good.  In the case of
SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI the same is true, and that viewpoint needs to be
acknowledged.  Web services products do not implement REST, they implement
SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and a number of other specifications that are starting to
emerge.
...
Over time, the industry may move more toward the pure document exchange
model.  And SOAP does include a document oriented interaction type that
provides some foundation for this.  But let's defer this step till after
we've worked out the architecture for the current world. Yes.
</eric>

Although I agree with you that adoption is key, I would strongly disagree
that web services have been widely adopted. 

Most of the current use of Web services within the enterprise are RPC
experiments. 

I personally think that RPC will quickly fade away as an aberration of the
web services (the same way, Java applet were cool but faded away) and the
enterprise will instead adopt document and event driven interactions because
they are a far superior solution to the integration pains that the
enterprise are experimenting.

Re: REST versus SOA, it seems to me that the 2 camps are much closer than it
might appear. REST is missing some of the key pieces addressed by XML
Schema/WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Security, etc... 

The only place where there seems to be a strong disagreement if the unified
interface. Unfortunately, there aren't enough mature real world deployment
to be able to judge the pros and cons of either approach went it comes to
adaptability. As Ann points out in here email, SOA has some benefits when it
comes to design: I can define one order management portType and group 20
methods. On the other hand, if you look at all existing solutions used for
integration (EAI and B2B), they are all bases on a message bus which exposes
a very simple interface (susbscribe, publish).

I do not think that we should let that difference fracture REST and SOA.

Edwin

Received on Sunday, 18 May 2003 13:53:26 UTC