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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Finding the problem
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Ted Neward identifies the vendor adoption problem with WS protocols:
Here's the deal: Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and others are all finding that trying to implement production-quality Web services right now is Hard Thing To Do. The tool stacks are still half-baked, the standards aren't really ubiquitous nor widely-supported yet (c'mon, folks, we're still seeing vendor implementations that are choosing the WS-I-obsoleted SOAP 1.1 Spec over the WS-I-approved SOAP 1.2 version, we're clearly not keeping up with the spec movement), and the specs just keep coming, and coming and coming. If these companies, whose very business depends on both the traditional consumer chain transforming into a more lucrative business-to-business chain, are finding that the WS-* stack is failing them, what chance do the rest of us have of making all this stuff work?
The problem is in the the specs keep coming and coming part. Look, here's a tip - keeping up with the WS standards isn't the only thing on a vendor's queue. I've said before that Web Services is the new CORBA - and this is more proof. Back in the 90's, the OMG churned rapidly with specs no one cared about. The web services folks seem to think that's a model worth striving for. Slow down, and actually think about what you're doing, instead of just adding specs "because you can".
In the meantime, many of the vendors will be solving actual problems they have with actual customers and prospects...