The WS-* specifications

Great poster (via Stefan).

Our industry WS-* leaders, and all of us (Web and Web Services advocates together), should have a good look at this poster and perhaps take a moment to reflect… where did all go wrong? Why are there specs doing the same thing in a slightly different way? Why some of the specs are so unnecessarily complicated?

This should have been easy!

6 responses to “The WS-* specifications”

  1. Mark Little

    Part of the problem is that there’s no single body overseeing the “architecture”. There’s no equivalent of IETF or OMG. W3C and OASIS are fine, but only W3C has a notion of a Web Services architecture (which is now horribly out-of-date anyway).

  2. leo

    You guys have forgotten the KISS principle.

  3. John

    Some spec duplication is simply a marketing/”me too” issue on the part of some companies.

    Security, reliabiilty and transactions are difficult problems in any system. Now make that system distributed and loosely coupled – the difficulty level raises substantially.

    The key word to remember here is composability. Use what you need for the solution at hand and ignore the rest.

  4. It’s a mess not because of lack of oversight, but because of the lack of use of principled design techniques.

  5. Mark Little

    Mark, I think your comment “because of the lack of use of principled design techniques” is a bit sweeping and overstating things. I obviously can’t speak for all of the WS-* specifications, but I’m confident this doesn’t apply to the ones I’ve been involved with. Those ones really do have more of a political agenda around them. Having done this kind of work through the OMG for over a decade, I’m pretty confident that an organisational structure like that would have been of benefit to the community.

  6. Mark Little

    Actually I think I just made a sweeping statement too 😉 Some of the specs. I’m on (like WS-Addressing) do fall into your category. But I still believe that a structure like that within the OMG would help to impose a better order on the chaos.