Paul Kulchenko: services

EAI Journal: The Web Services Scandal; How Data Semantics Have Been Overlooked in Integration Solutions.

"At best, the lessons we’ve learned from industry’s work with EDI have shown us that:

Defining standard vocabularies is difficult and time-consuming.
Once defined, standards don’t adapt well.
People don’t implement standards correctly anyway.

Today’s Web services scandal is that:

The hype around dynamic discovery is overblown.
Vendors aren’t focused on the semantic element of the problem.
One wonders if the technology’s evolution is not misdirected."

That's probably why documents should be the primary focus and the way you send bytes and bits is of secondary importance. Build your vocabularies, define your semantics, structure your documents, then talk about SOAP, REST or pigeon mail to deliver them.

Jon Udell: Road to managed code. "What .Net will do for the server family, sooner rather than later, is present a consistent set of interfaces to programmers. These interfaces will live in managed space as part of the .Net Framework and will enable any .Net language to control the servers. [...] the server products will become a set of components that can be scripted using .Net languages. This arrangement will enable developers to extend individual servers more productively, and it will be a huge win when -- as is typical -- they yoke different servers together in complex solutions." Interesting. Managed code is one of the key concepts of .NET Framework.

IBM was quick to release implementation of BPEL4WS called BPWS4J the very same day specification was published (which is today, August 9). More info from one of the co-authors, Sanjiva Weerawarana: "BPWS4J consists of two parts: an engine and an editor. The BPWS4J Engine is an all-Java implementation of BPEL4WS that runs in a
servlet container. The BPWS4J Editor is an Eclipse plugin that can be used with Eclipse v2.0+ (http://www.eclipse.org/)."

As it turns out, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or WS-BPEL) represents the merging of WSFL and XLANG specs. Wow! Two other specs. WS-Coordination: Describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. WS-Transaction: Describes coordination types that are used with the extensible coordination framework described in WS-Coordination.

CNET: Tech giants back new Web services. "Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems plan to announce new specifications Monday that the companies hope will help drive adoption of Web services. The first specification--called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services--is a programming language for defining how to combine Web services to accomplish a particular task. Web services are emerging methods of writing software that allows businesses to interact via the Internet. The second, WS-Coordination, describes how individual Web services within that task interact. A software programmer, for example, can stitch together Web services into a sequence of operations to accomplish a particular task. The third specification, called WS-Transaction, is used to ensure that transactions all complete successfully or fail as a group." I'm wondering what are the relationships between newly created BPEL4WS, and XLANG (Microsoft), WSFL/WSXL (IBM) and WSCL (HP) specs?

toolbox: Preparing .NET updated. More than 80 links added; some definitions were deleted (.NET My Services), some updated (smart devices) and some added (.NET Development).

Sam Ruby: REST + SOAP. "In reality, there aren't two sides. There are at least four: Everything is a resource. Everything is a get. Everything is a message. Everything is a procedure." I think Sam again got it right. It's not about on what side you are, it's about how you can productively use both approaches.

Amazon API. Cool, Amazon releases their a web service API! Interfaces to the Amazon API are an rpc/encoded SOAP endpoint described with WSDL and a raw XML over HTTP endpoint described using XML schemas & prose. Savvy move. There are already some quite interesting uses of the API: BookWatch combines RSS, the Google API and the Amazon API; and Similarities Graph creates diagrams of the similarities between books. For fun, check out the Similarities Graph for C# Essentials. When looking at the API one thing I noticed was both the WSDL and XSDs type everything as string even if a more specific schema type exists. For example, in the SOAP API /Details/ImageUrlSmall is typed as xs:string, I would have expected this to be xs:anyURI. Any thoughts on why they chose this route? [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I would also love to see the date of release to be typed as date, but I agree with Sam: they took the least common denominator (LCD) approach to maximize interop. I just wonder, when will be the time when we don't need to think about LCD to interop? Seems like I still have a lot of work to do with SOAP::Lite.

More from Phil Wainewright (Loosely Coupled Weblog): Christensen on standards and componentization. "The challenge facing us is to define the core web services standards for componentization in a way that will unleash and extend innovation, rather than embrace and extinguish it."

Loosely Coupled: Forrester warns of web services wildfire. "These historical parallels highlight the one overriding challenge that CIOs will face with web services — how to manage the anarchy of a major change in computing technology, without suppressing the innovation that will be required to take advantage of the opportunities that it is sure to bring. The lesson of history is that the 'safe choice' of sticking with established big-name vendors will lead many enterprises into expensive wild goose chases down tortuous and bruising blind alleys. Making the right choices will demand a lot of imagination and hands-on involvement from those CIOs — along with a recognition that neither Gartner nor Forrester nor any other analyst is going to be in a position to provide all the answers."

Liberty Alliance Publishes 1.0 Spec. The long-awaited specs are available for those willing to give some basic personal info to the alliance members. The Overview document looks interesting. More thoughts when I've had a chance to read the PDFs. [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies] Expect some thoughts from me too ;) Update: Peter Drayton already posted his comments.

angryCoder: Web Service Listings -- What's The Frequency, Kenneth? "Web Services will never gain any momentum beyond marketing hype as long as they remain so poorly documented. To begin fixing the problem, both SalCentral and XMethods should begin doing a more thorough job of screening Web Services and rejecting those that do not provide adequate documentation. Web Service developers need to be nudged (or shoved) in the right direction. After all, it doesn't matter whether you are releasing a free Web Service, or a Web Service that you intend to charge for."

Sam Gentile: For the last 7 months, I have had the priviledge of working for Jack Ozzie and with some very bright people at Groove Networks in creating a full design add-in, the Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, that will allow the .NET developer to create fully collaborative and peer-to-peer applications quickly and easily inside of VS.NET.

Mark Baker: UDDI v3 Announced; did anybody notice? I definitely noticed. "Besides the ability to mark UDDI registration data with identifiers, another design goal is the ability to assign category information. Without categorization, locating data within a UDDI registry would prove to be very difficult. Especially for the discovery of previously unknown businesses, services, bindings or service types, it is indispensable that the corresponding UDDI registration data is marked with a set of categories that can universally be searched on." Even though specification includes 'Using simple categories', 'Grouping categories' and 'Deriving categories' sections, I don't see how it helps to discover previously unknown business without knowing categorization that was used. Am I missing something?

Microsoft Architecture Overview: Executive Summary. "This document is intended for business, software, and infrastructure architects who want to understand Microsoft's approach to enterprise, application, and technology architectures. It covers architectural terminology, patterns, concepts, and definitions as a series of views or levels of architecture."

Microsoft: Patterns & Practices. "Patterns and practices contain specific recommendations illustrating how to design, build, deploy, and operate architecturally sound solutions to challenging business and technical scenarios. The technical guidance is reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineering teams, consultants, and Product Support, and by partners and customers."

Microsoft: .NET Architecture Center. "The .NET Architecture Center is a new site devoted to business, software, and infrastructure architects. The Center is a collaborative effort involving Microsoft product teams, MSDN, TechNet, and Microsoft's new Architecture Review Board, and it spans the boundaries of MSDN, TechNet, and other sources to serve multiple perspectives, or views, of enterprise architecture."

Simon Fell: "No doubt the first of many dumb questions about OS X". I don't think it's a dumb question ("how to implement web service in AppleScript") ;). This list of SOAP toolkits says that AppleScript is a 'client only' implementation and I believe that's correct (let me know if you find otherwise). You can use SOAP::Lite (or some other toolkit) to run as a server and developer.apple.com plans to publish Randal Schwartz's article 'Connecting AppleScript and Perl with SOAP' that describes how to do that (sorry, no live link yet).

Tim Ewald: The Web Services Idea. "The phenomenal success of the Web programming model can be attributed to one core characteristic: it is much more loosely coupled than traditional distributed programming models."

Microsoft: XML Web Services Developer Center. Nice. I wish Tim also included links to the list of SOAP toolkits and the list of SOAP and web services books I maintain ;).

toolbox: YAWINP (Yet Another What Is .NET Piece). ".NET = .NET Servers + .NET Framework + XML Web Services + smart clients + user experience"

James Snell: "Hmm, I still say that SOAP::Lite and PocketSOAP (in that order) are hands down the two best SOAP implementations available today. Due simply because of their simplicity and quality. The fact that both are written by 1-man-development-teams is a fact not to be missed." Thanks James. I wish I could do for SOAP community as much as Simon.

Mike Deem: "We (meaning the SOAP community as embodied on soapbuilders) have done a damn fine job working around and within these specifications to deliver an amazingly interoperable cross platform messaging infrastructure. It is an accomplishment that ranks very high on the all time list of truly wonderful things that have happened with computers. We should be very proud of this." Amen.

Daniel Savareze: The Right SOAP. "Why are so many programmers having a hard time getting their arms around Web services?"

John Udell: Glue, Gaia, and the services grid. "As every user of Glue knows, Graham [Glass, the wizard behind The Mind Electric] is more than a brilliant software engineer. He has an even rarer talent for simplicity. In Glue, as Larry Wall says of Perl, "easy things are easy, and hard things are possible." That's why I think of Glue as the SOAP::Lite of Java. The easy thing that Glue makes easy is the basic web services stack. The hard thing that Gaia makes possible is a grid fabric which, though intended first for web services, has more general possibilities." Hm, "Glue as the SOAP::Lite of Java". I like that. Thanks, John. Agree with everything you said about Graham and Glue. Glue is super simple and easy to use. Sometimes it's even simpler than SOAP::Lite ;). Kudos Graham!