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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: What a waste of time
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I spent Saturday morning at UCSD's Web Services Interoperability Day, an event that was suppose to bring together leading experts on Web services standards and tools. Since Ted Neward was the Keynote speaker and the venue was just a 30-minute drive away, it seemed to be a no-brainer.
As always, Ted's performance was spectacular, but that was where it ended. I noticed only later that even he was wearing his dot-NET Tee, literally.
The rest was the typical Microsoft kind-of Demo-for-Developers stuff, where coders try to walk you through snippets of code taken from 1000s of lines of .NET WebServices stuff, And no, you were not allowed to take a closer look - don't even think about downloading that demo-ed code after the session - some forthcoming stuff was used to make a fairly simple sample work, where a Web service consumer requested information from a producer but had to go through a SAML service before.
The MC moderating the demo was constantly bashing open-source for its complexity (i.e., look at all the JARs one needs to make Axis work) and IBM for not cooperating (they wouldn't even give me a Tivoli license for my presentation). Other experts included Heinrich Gantenbein, IDesign's Java to .NET interop. expert. While Micosoft's regional directors were sitting in the last row and probably controlling the whole event, the presenters managed to give the impression that WebServices and their interoperability in particular are very fragile and extremely hard to deploy, especially if one chooses not to use Microsoft's or BEA's tools.
Several hardcore SOAP and WS experts in the audience spoke up briefly before leaving the event frustrated. I left shortly before the Mircosoft sponsored lunch was served - I simply didn't want to take the risk to choke.
It's very concerning to me to see an respected institution like UCSD Extensions corrupt itself, shamelessly advertise Microsoft tools and technologies, criticizing Microsoft's competitors and bashing well known and widely used and deployed open source projects.
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