It’s been a week since the W3C Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing
wrapped up, and I’ve had some time to reflect on it.
On the plus side, there’s been some very welcome progress in Web services vendors moving towards the Web. Having Web services stalwarts Chris Ferris and Glen Daniels acknowledge that the use of URIs and HTTP GET was a better way to request data, gave me the warm-and-fuzzies. But they didn’t go beyond that, to consider the value of the mutating-side of the uniform interface. Dave Orchard also reiterated his position that Web services need service-specific writes.
On the down side though, I don’t think much was accomplished at the workshop itself. The point I was trying to make in my presentation, about SOA/WS not separating interface and implementation, must have gone totally over peoples’ heads because nobody commented on it, either to agree or disagree. And the recommendations seemed largely toothless with respect to doing something about this mess within the W3C… though I suppose the WS-Core proposal to consolidate maintenance of the W3C WS-* specs would save some resources.
As always though, it was great to get together with this group of folks; despite our technical disagreements, and the occasional hurt feeling over the past few years, there’s still a lot of mutual respect there. It was also nice to meet some people face-to-face for the first time, such as Pete and Dims.
Speaking of Pete, he also had, IMO, the best line of the workshop. On the topic of description languages, he commented;
Stop trying to stop the world and describe it
Bang on.
Update; I forgot to mention that I met Chuck as well. He has a great workshop-followup post with an example of why GET+URIs are better.