You know, I think most people would agree that I’ve written quite enough about this stuff. But this one particular WS-piñata swung right into my face, and I simply can’t resist a whack at it. In this particular case, I even have some of the political back-story. But first, check out Evolving Web services standards for managing system resources and have a peek at this remarkable PDF white paper: Toward Converging Web Service Standards for Resources, Events, and Management (both released March 15 by HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft).
I read the white paper and was puzzled, failing to get what was going on. So I poked around and got an explanation that runs something like this: One WS-Faction supports WSDM, thus WS-RF and WS-Notification; the other WS-Management, now at DMTF. These mostly do the same thing, I’m told. Anyhow, somebody said “Why don’t we All Just Get Along?” and thus this roadmap on how everything’s going to be harmonized, “over the next 18-24 months”.
So, brace yourself for heavy convergence. H/I/I/M will write some new specifications, WS-Transfer Addendum and WS-ResourceTransfer, and revise WS-MetadataExchange (which I’ve never quite managed to understand, but Don Box says it’s at the center of WS-everything, and I trust Don). Also new will be WS-EventNotification, and another that isn’t yet named yet, “a forthcoming common Web services management specification”.
However, various subgroups of the H/I/I/M posse are going to be supporting the existing to-be-superseded and to-be-amended specs in the interim, and are apparently suggesting, straight-faced, that it might be sane for customers to use them.
I guess I won’t offer any further commentary on the contents of this document. I can’t help but feel for the H/I/I/M staff who are going to have to do the work, and am reminded of Fritz Lang’s immortal Metropolis, where Maria says: “Nobody cared about the slaves who died laboring to raise the Tower of Babel.”
