Has Web services, the technology intended to simplify programming, gotten too complex?
A debate is raging over whether the number of specifications based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), defining everything from how to add security to where to send data, has mushroomed out of control. Defenders of advanced Web services specifications say they are needed to ensure that new computing architectures are flexible enough to accommodate both sophisticated and smaller-scale applications. Detractors say that simpler application development methods are good enough.
The rallying cry for people who favour simplicity is a technology approach called REST, or Representational State Transfer, a method of building applications by sending XML documents over existing Internet protocols. This allows programmers to construct applications with existing tools and computing infrastructure, notably HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).
The long-running dispute has even drawn in some of the technological fathers of Web services. Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML and director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, said recently that Web services standards have become "bloated, opaque and insanely complex."
At stake is whether, or how quickly, customers will continue to invest in emerging Web services software -- considered the foundation of modern computing systems -- to replace older methods of wiring business applications together. Researchers at the Radacati Group last week forecasted that the market for Web services-related software and services will balloon from $950 million this year to about $6.2 billion in four years.
An attempt at flexibility
The term "Web services" emerged about four years ago to describe a set of software specifications, or blueprints, designed to make incompatible programs communicate over Internet protocols. Heavy hitters IBM, Microsoft and others agreed to back the specifications rather than pursue differing approaches to software compatibility as they had done in the past.
In an effort to make these Web services systems as reliable as older computing systems, but more flexible, vendors have supplemented the initial basic Web services specifications with a number of extensions. Infrastructure software providers IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems, Oracle and others have authored specifications to add security, reliability and other features on top of the basic Web services protocols, notably SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language).
That ongoing process of specification development has caused consternation among some people, who claim that programmers and their employers cannot absorb the flow of new specifications. There are now more than 30 specs, which include hundreds of pages of technical guidelines. IBM and Microsoft have fostered the development and publication of many of those specifications, referred to collectively as the "WS-*" or "WS-star" rubric.
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Let's not kid ourselves about Web services and their potential, but let's also not lose sight of the fact most businesses are still asking what are 'web services'?
For technically illiterate managers, they're nothing more than EDI systems of yesterday dressed up in a new terminology. Unless someone can demonstrate, in a capable and coherent way what web services actually are, do and offer, businesses what know what they mean.
Whilst the IT profession pushes on, the meaning of web services becomes more and more diffuse. Neither Microsoft nor IBM can agree on a single standard definition in their corporate literature, and over-emphasise on the jargon far too much.
Yes, we've lost sight of what they're meant to do, and what the vendors say they can do.
Dave Hall is correct when it comes to "business oriented" web services. Furthermore, the same mistakes with EDI (which can mean whatever you want it to mean despite the existence of so-called "standards") are now being replicated in the wide variety of XML DTDs available.