Monthly Archives: November 2004

SOA critique

A couple of quality posts today on some problems with Web services and agreement on what exactly service orientation is. Good to see, especially when it comes from those who are largely WS/SOA proponents, rather than, well, me the outsider. 8-)

Implementation details

Dave suggests implementation details are important. As one of those who made the “implementation detail” claim, I’ll state my definition; An “implementation detail” is an aspect of the design or implementation of a system, which has no effect on the architecture of that system, i.e. does not affect the relationships between components, connectors, and data.… Read More »

Indiscriminate consumption

A couple of weeks ago, Phil Wainewright had a great post on the role of standards. A few people picked up on it, but nobody picked up on the opening sentence (AFAICT); Does anyone still believe that web services will be published and consumed indiscriminately on the open Internet? I believe when people set out… Read More »

Web services semantics

Tim Ewald’s asking all the right questions; If all of this makes your head spinning, it should, because there is a lack of consistency here. If I’m designing a Web service, where do semantics exist? Are they in the message body, where they started? Are they in one or both of the action URIs? If… Read More »

The new gig

For those of you not at XML 2004 last week, my new client is Justsystem, a mid sized (800 employee) consumer and enterprise software company based in Japan with a long history of successful product development. I’m working there part time, for at least the next several months, assisting them in making a new Web… Read More »

The irony of protocol independence

Yes, it’s protocol independence theme month! A gem of an exchange between the WSD and XMLP WGs. It turns out that WSD wanted to be able to send a SOAP request via HTTP, but get the response back on some other channel. Fortunately, HTTP supports the 202 response code which permits the server to indicate… Read More »

WSDL, operation names, and self-description

A good presentation by David Booth which elaborates on what I’ve been saying for some time now; messages should be self-descriptive, and that effectively requires an operation in the message itself (unless you’ll only ever have one operation). I’ve got a couple of minor nits with the presentation, but nothing of consequence. Nice job, David.

Quote of the day

I see no reason to tolerate harbingers of doom unless they are being constructive. — Roy Fielding to the Atompub WG. I always wanted a motto. Now I’ve got one. 8-)

Atom; nothing to see here

I feel dirty. I actually agree with Dave Winer; Tim Bray suggests that Atom might nearly be finished. I read his comments carefully, and find the benefits of the possibly-final Atom to be vague, and the premise absolutely incorrect. Unlike SGML, RSS has been widely deployed, successfully, by users of all levels of technical expertise.… Read More »