Friday, March 2, 2007

W3C Workshop Day 1

Well last Tuesday I was at a workshop of the W3C. A first for me, and I enjoyed it a lot, after I got the acronyms down that is. I loved having the wikipedia at my fingertips I have to say!

The first day was titled "What's missing from the picture - new stuff to consider". The gist of that day was that some people fully embraced Web Services with SOAP and WSDL. The speed of development is great, and there are a great number of extension standards to make Web Services into first class Services. I actually presented a paper by Mark to push towards a general context standard in Web Services.

However other voices were calling to "Stop making standards and let's make things work". This quote is from Paul Downey from BT and it resonated with a lot of other people in the meeting. Basically vendors are still working out some interoperability issues and there are no 'best practices' available on how to really use SOAP with all it's WS-* extensions. They were calling on the w3c to provide somekind of test suite and knowledge base. In my humble opinion I see a huge oppertunity for the Open Source community to jump in here, and for the JBossESB in particular. I think we should lead the way to bring WS-* to the developer community. JBoss has always been very much in touch with the developers, and I think there is an opportunity for the JBossESB team to show how these standards can be used to right way.

Well I'd love to hear what you think. Stay tuned for what happened on day 2 of the workshop!

1 comment:

Mark Little said...

Glad you enjoyed the workshop. I've been saying for years that Web Services are as much about interoperability as they are about loosely coupled internet-scale applications. If you look at how Web Services are being deployed, at the moment the majority of cases are for interoperability of heterogeneous implementations in closely coupled environments. Plus, I agree that JBossESB can play a great role in this.