Web Things, by Mark Baker

A few people have already commented on Don’s comments about there being enough specs already. FWIW, and not too surprisingly I expect, I saw those comments as a direct jab at BEA, who earlier this week released three more WS-* specs.

It was good to finally see BEA go out on its own, lord knows that’s been long overdue. But those three specs were very disappointing as a first attempt. I mean, they’re ok work (though MessageData seems to be a pretty weak attempt at addressing Roy’s issue about the different types of HTTP headers being all munged together), but are over specified (note to authors, leave some room in the margins for the standardization process 8-), and don’t stand alone very well. They need to be bundled together under some kind of catch-all “SOAP Extension Suite” or something. Or perhaps in WS-I, separating them out as three is the best way to get them into some new-fangled profile, who knows. Ah politics, gotta love ’em.

A flurry of “It’s not REST vs. SOAP” comments in response to Bob McMillan’s latest REST article.

I helped Bob with that story, and I know I’m always careful to frame the argument as “REST vs. Web services” rather than “REST vs. SOAP”, so I apologize for not communicating that point to Bob well enough. Heck, I spent all that time on the XML Protocol WG for a reason, you know; to make sure SOAP became the best darned PEP replacement it could be.

But I suppose there’s an inevitability to this confusion, since the word “SOAP” brings along with it an implied use, which is contrary to REST. Unfortunate, but whad’ya gonna do?