Web Services: Johnny Come...Slowly?
In Karsten Januszewski's response to my analysis of Pat Helland's Software Oriented Enterprise presentation on web service reliability, he mentioned that my analysis was reminiscent of Eric Schmidt's 2001 article on designing reliable communications. It's good that I've caught up to three years ago! Well, if Johnny's come lately, hopefully he's not coming slowly. I've been doing my homework on the veritable flood of information on the new web services standards and hope to post some useful tidbits of what I've found.
What's obvious is that critical mass has been building on the web services specifications that Microsoft and IBM are spearheading. Although the specifications are many, they are designed to be composable and well-factored. I sense from the participants, a momentum toward a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts. The recent The .NET Show episode with John Shewchuk showed to me a belief among the participant of the Web Services standardization effort that we are being ushered into a new era of interoperation and, with it, productivity increases. Hopefully it's enough to offset the jobs lost to outsourcing.