There’s been an interesting flurry of high-level WS-discussion, launched by Don Box in Pragmatics (it’s short, go read it, the long string of comments doesn’t add much). The discussion sloshed around the blogosphere; I’ll pick some highlights. Stefan Tilkov says Mu: “I do believe that on a very high level, the debate is utterly irrelevant.” I don’t. I just don’t believe that there’s a level high enough that large-scale basic infrastructure bets don’t matter. Chris Ferris offers conventional wisdom: WS-* is just fine, taking a little longer than we’d hoped, but you’re really gonna need this stuff. Patrick Logan pushes back: “I was shocked how little interoperability, not to mention functionality, has been accomplished in the WSDL and SOAP world over the last several years ... we decided to run a different experiment... address the same business problem but with just HTTP. Very soon we were spending all our time talking about business functionality and messages rather than infrastructure headaches.” Ooh. Dare Obasanjo weighs in twice: More on Pragmatism and Web Services, and especially Why WS-* interop sucks. I’ll leave the last word to Rob Sayre in No, It’s Over, I Really Mean It: “If you have Microsoft saying ‘well, the best approach is to make this elaborate infrastructure we’ve spent billions of dollars building out optional’, then the debate is over.” Me, I think the WS-stench of something WS-rotting from the WS-head down is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
