Dan Fernandez reminds us that the third version of Microsoft's Java language conversion tool will convert many server side APIs like EJB, JMS, and RMI.
I have an architect friend at a Really Big Company that's starting to get sold on the do more with less mantra. This might help to grease the wheels.
Many thanks to Karsten Januszewski, former PM for the UDDI team, for answering my questions. While encouraging, Karsten's answers are insufficient for my purposes. He does confirm that void one way messages fit the bill for a message-based API. This is good. He bleeds into stating that Indigo's WS-Reliable Messaging architecture will eliminate the need to write one's own Ack/Nak protocol. That would be an argument for using reliable messaging in all of your future Web Service APIs. I am bemused by this.
- Although I will not need to keep resend logic around, won't I still need my own timeout logic?
- Aren't there any negatives to reliable messaging? Is it really a panacea?
Karsten rightly trumpets the fact that Indigo is the Grand Unified Messaging infrastructure. I agree, this is also good. However I would still argue that the ASMX and Remoting APIs are dead. We will naturally move to the Indigo APIs for new development. Which gets us back to my core question. I want to move my code to Indigo when it comes out. How do I write my ASMX contracts to most easily move to Indigo? Here Karsten titillates with a stay tuned message. Unfortunately I cannot just stay tuned, I have a product to deliver.
Finally, Karsten speaks cryptically of addressable clients. As far as I am concerned, callbacks across a firewall is a non-starter. I wasn't at the PDC, but looking at the slides, it looks as though there is a back channel set up when the channel established. Extrapolating, I would suppose that, when one incorporates reliable messaging, return messages get sent whenever the client connects, thus eliminating the need for callbacks. Of course the client will still have to poll... That's just the physics of it, I suppose. As I like to say, for all their utility imaginary numbers are still just that.
Karsten was game to answer my questions so well. I can only suppose that Indigo is in so much flux that they can't give us a sufficient answer on how to write our ASMX contracts. Any little bit helps; however, the “Write ASMX” drumbeat is starting to sound a little hollow, in my opinion. I think they can, and should, give us more.
Update: Thanks, Karsten, for answering my reliable messaging question!