Blogarithms
Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.
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Behind the Curtain at WS-I. John Hogan, news editor at SearchWebServices.com, spoke with some of the members of WS-I's board about what happened along to way to WS-I's new Basic Profile 1.0. WS-I isn't a standards body. Instead, they've released this important document that tell us which of the many standards to use and how to combine them if we want to develop interoperable services. From Hogan's interview:
- "The working group dropped the idea of SOAP encoding interoperability in favor of XML Schema as the type system for Web services."
- "Fully 44% of the [interoperability] issues we tackled, of the 200-odd issues, were around the WSDL specification," [Chris Ferris, chairman of the Basic Profile working group and a senior software engineer at IBM] said. The working group had to clarify WSDL and "clean up the ambiguity aspects of it," such as how to use it with SOAP and the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry.
Other examples from the WS-IBP itself include:
- Don't use DTDs or precessing instructions. They're out!
- Use HTTP POSTs, not the new Extension Framework.
- IP port 80 is acceptable, although not ideal.
- The handling of HTTP status codes is explained.
- Cookies are permitted as a way to manage state, but only only under certain circumstances.
- All XML Schema must be derived from http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema.
Read and use the WS-IBP. You'll be gald you did.
WS-IBP is a huge help to us all. Highly recommended.
Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2003 4:02:15 PM 
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IT Conversation: Anne Thomas Mannes. My latest IT Conversation with Anne Thomas Manes contains so many valuable
insights, it's worth a more detailed summary than most. Here are some of the
things Anne had to say:
- Advanced Web Sevices. Anne expects to see WS-Security implemented
in software products in 6-12 months. Reliability in the messaging layer will
take more than a year.
- Interoperability. Older products don't interoperate well. Anne recommends
the products from Systinet, The
Mind Electric, IONA, and CapeClear
because they provide the best Java/.NET interop. She says to stay away from
Apache SOAP, which was replaced by
Apache Axis. Anne is a big fan of
WS-I's
Basic Profile.
- Web-Services Protocol Development. We spoke at length about the unusual
way in web-services protocols have been developed. As Anne pointed out, web
services are all about interoperability, so there was no way to have implementations
in advance of the standards--the traditional sequence for standards development.
We agreed that progress has been extraordinarily rapid, despite some in the
press who complain that it's taking too long.
- Scalability. I asked her about the lack of real-world scalability
testing, and Anne pointed out that we need real-world applications before
we can really understand scalability. She specifically mentioned gigabit Ethernet
and proposals for compressed XML as technologies that will obviate some of
the current inefficiencies of XML.
- The Future of EAI Vendors. Because good EAI software includes much
more than connectivity, it's fairly sticky. By way of comparison, Anne pointed
out that even though WebSphere and Web Logic are both based on J2EE, you wouldn't
likely switch from one to the other unless you had a specific problem with
your current product or its vendor. Good EAI software is equally sticky.
- SCO Linux Lawsuits. Anne is "very disappointed" with the
current situation. She's particularly worried that IBM has raised the issue
of the General
Public License (GPL) and that SCO is therefore challenging its validity.
If the courts finds against the GPL concept, the entire open-source community
will be affected.
- Novell's Acquisition of Ximian. Novell picked up GNOME and Mono,
but the latter is the more interesting. Microsoft put C# and the Common
Language Infrastructure (CLI) into the public domain. They're now ISO/ECMA
standards. Mono is an open-source Linux implementation of CLI, which means
that compiled (bytecode) versions of C#
programs can be run on Linux. Anne says that "C# is Java--The Next Generation."
She's a huge fan. If programmers are willing to develop under Windows, C#
and Mono may offer them true portability.
You can hear this all first hand. It's a great IT
Conversation.
Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2003 12:09:17 AM
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