Kurt Cagle's Take On XML Web Services Edge, Boston 2003

For those of you that don’t subscribe to Kurt Cagle’s Metaphorical Web Blog/Articles you are missing some really good XML related stuff.  Couldn’t agree more with his take on the current direction of web services:

The take on web services in general? Even taking into account the effect of war in the background, the conference did not inspire me with confidence. Web Services as a field is largely a non-starter. It is a technology that aims to chase the diminishing monies of Ford or General Electric or Boeing rather than customers much farther down the food chain, and the big companies aren't exactly burning a path to their doors. It's "cool" technology, and therein lies its biggest flaw: it solves nothing that other, older technologies do not already solve, and it is all too easy to roll out these services without multi-million dollar investments in proprietary solutions. Consequently, the tools fall into the "might make an administrator's life a little less hectic" category; the convenience to the administrator is probably not worth rewiring a company's existing infrastructure.

So where's the action? In the XML space, most of the action is occurring either extremely upstream at the standards level or is going on in the Open Source community, well outside the paying crowd. When people (and companies) are broke, they don't buy Porsches or Ferraris ... they buy bicycles. The attendance for the XSLT2/XPath2 talk I gave was surprisingly heavy given the convention size, and while it's flattering to think that it may have been me as the draw I'm much more inclined to believe that people are genuinely interested in what's happening in those two specs. The WS-I initiatives between IBM and Sun and Microsoft have a few vendors happy, but for the average IT shop, they are getting into arcane and cryptic technologies that have no real bearing to the way they do business. My opinion of WS-I hasn't changed ... it's vendors hoping to set alternative RAND models to the existing Royalty Free ones, and they just do not understand why it is that most people are greeting these developments with disinterested yawns. Next year, all of the fancy monitoring tools will be sporting WS-I Inside logos, and there will be just as few people wandering the aisles.

As far as I’m concerned there is not enough focus on using web services with medium to large (anyone with more that one IT department) corporations.  With all the problems corporations have trying to get their departments to play nice, department to department web services could be marketed as a way to get them to work together, and not have to give up much in the way of autonomy.   You could even use web services to solve some of the data warehousing issues (by the time all the corporate data gets to the warehouse it could be too old to be useful).  When I first saw MyServices, I thought it would be better suited for corporation, rather than focused on consumers, and nothing has changed my mind since the last PDC.

Don XML