I was talking to Mark Hapner, a smart guy here at Sun who does heavy Java architecture, about WS-Sanity, and he had an angle that’s new to me. In recent decades, he points out, good new technologies have first appeared in rough-and-ready form on the Internet, then migrated into the enterprise. (I remember when query tracking first showed up on the FedEx site; that was ten years ago, and it instantly opened a few million eyes to a better new way to deliver data). But all the WS-* hullabaloo is trying to go the other way; it’s trying to model all the (necessary) complexities of current IT infrastructure and turn them into many thick layers of abstractions wrapped around a Webbish core. So, if you believed in history, where would you look for the future of “Web Services?” You’d look at the people who are doing them in a rough-and-ready fashion out there on the Net. The names that come to my mind are Amazon, Google, EBay, Salesforce.com, maybe SABRE. [Update: Via the Sabre Geek, a pointer to what they’re doing.] Whatever they’re doing, that’s Web Services or SOA or the Services Fabric or whatever you want to call it. Anything they don’t need, maybe it isn’t going to be real important.
