Tim Bray finds a cluster of of webservices specs and asks: Is this the future? Is the emperor dressed? - Tim Bray Tim has found twenty six specs. Elsewhere the apache wiki more comprehensively lists forty eight, but I'm sure there's closer to sixty and that's not including any of the Grid computing ones which baseline with WSDL/SOAP. There are so many, in fact, that I've justified setting up an RSS feed cut from the apache wiki, so the rest of us (pun intended) can keep up. Bob Sutor said recently that this has to be the year we stop talking about SOAP and WSDL. True, but really SOAP and WSDL are the least of our worries. The industry collectively needs to stop generating specifications for specifications sake. A lot of webservices spec writing and work within standards bodies is being done without much (it seems) real understanding of what the value of specifications and standards bodies are. Richard Feynman has described this mentality perfectly: In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennashe's the controllerand they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. 1 I see WS-* as a cargo cult and as such it runs the risk of being a failure. Thankfully some folks get it, and realise we need to ratify and ground things at the very least in running code, even if we don't quite have rough consensus. [1] I first came across the Feynman quote many moons ago when Steve McConnell described the cargo cult in software engineering....
Previous Topic
