When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · November
· · · · 06 (1 entry)
WS-Interop · We did a Web Services announcement Friday, and while I’m not on that team, I think it’s significant. Basically, it says that we’re implementing enough of WS-* to interoperate with Microsoft Indigo Windows Communications Foundation, and that the implementations will be Open Source. Let’s be blunt (and remember, I speak only for myself here): WS-* isn’t about standards. It’s about what Microsoft (there are partners, but it’s mostly Microsoft) chooses to implement while waving the WS-banner and retroactively shaking Standards Fairy Dust over the process. Which is OK, as far as it goes; I get the impression that Indigo WCF is actually some pretty neat software that will be useful to a lot of Microsoft customers, and Sun has a stake in the ground saying we’re going to interoperate with the Microsoft WS-stack. Do I think this stuff is going to Change The World? No. Do I think that this is the real future of Web Services? No. (I think the future looks like Amazon Web Services or the Atom Publishing Protocol or even recent arrivals like the Backpack API, even though Backpack could be done with the Atom Protocol). But I do think that WS-Microsoft-Interop is the right thing to do at the moment. Oh, and by the way; if you’re one of the many many people grinding away at one of the WS-inventions that hasn’t shown up already in this interop story, well, there may be grounds for worry.
