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Rashomon. Want to get two entirely different perspectives on the reality of web services? Listen to the vendors, then to developers who are in the trenches trying to make this stuff work. I've been conducting interviews for my new book, Strategies for Web Services, and I feel as though I've been watching the Kurosawa classic film, Rashomon, in which events are presented from four observers' differening perspectives. Can these people truly be describing the same thing.
Ask the vendors, and you'll be convinced web services are for real and perfectly do-able today. They'll even show you case studies of successful implementations. But independently track down programmers on the front lines who haven't been spoon-fed by the vendors, and you'll hear a very different story. Everyone I've spoken with who's trying to use SOAP and WSDL in a reasonably complex heterogenous environment is suffereing. Most of the problems they're encountering are associated with variations in protocol implementations. In some cases, they appear to stem from still-evolving specs. In others, they're from differences in implementations and tools. But in every case, real developers solving real problems tell me the same thing: Don't get into this now unless you have to. It's too early.
Of course, it's not as cut and dry as that, and I plan to sort it out for the book. If you want to be informed when it's available (scheduled for late November), make sure you've got your own email subscription to my IT Strategy Letter.
Posted Friday, April 05, 2002 12:35:25 AM 
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