I think Jonathon Schwartz (President/COO, Sun Microsystems) just joined the loyal WS opposition:

5. Web services may collapse under its own weight.

No one at the conference said this. Those are my words. I'm beginning to feel that all the disparate web service specs and fragmented standards activities are way out of control. Want proof? Ask one of your IT folks to define web services. Ask two others. They won’t match. We asked folks around the room – it was pretty grim. It’s either got to be simplified, or radically rethought.

As you know, I also believe simplicity and volume always win – and that today’s web services initiatives are in danger of vastly overcomplicating a very simple (really simple) solution.

What’s been apparent to those in the trenches for the past year or two is finally starting to find its way up the chain of command.

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Discuss

  1. One of the most amazing things is that Java already supports a nice system for managaging complex systems. Through the use of Java mobile code, and a handful of standards, a complete distributed system that is scalable and moldable into anything you need can be built. Jini is one such system that is still alive and growing. One of the standards in Jini is the ServiceUI standard created by Bill Veners and many others. ServiceUI provides the way that a simple Java API that is advertised as a Jini service, can be adapted to a new use. That use might be a new GUI, but it can also be a new invocation layer or a proxy transport layer etc. In RMI, there is only one VERB, INVOKE. The content of the INVOKE operation drives what happens. The REST crowd think that HTTP is the only uniform protocol.

    What web services is about, is about the strange and disparte world of Microsoft being accessible to the rest of the world. Rather than forcing microsoft to adopt existing standards, we're all jumping for joy and running in to the party that is all about microsoft charging us (expending resources and money) just to be able to talk to their proprietary system. When that gets to be too easy, we'll see them making more changes.

    They took the Java concepts and twisted them around to fit their platform, rather than joining the community of Java development and standardization. So, now, we all get to pay to play in their game, rather than them paying to play in our game.

    — Gregg Wonderly on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 05:17 AM #

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