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Wednesday May 10, 2006

WS-* Kool-Aid and JavaOne

Comments[2] by Dave in Java

Anne Thomas Manes has written an insightful overview of the REST vs. WS-* debate. She starts out by explaining that she doesn't just drink the WS-* Kool-Aid.
I'm one of the folks responsible for mixing the Kool-Aid. I presented at the W3C Workshop on Web Services (representing Sun). I participated in numerous standardization efforts at W3C, OASIS, WS-I, uddi.org, and JCP. I have a vested interest in making sure that WS-* succeeds.
She covers some of the same points I'm covering in my Atom talk (JavaOne 2006 TS-1756), which includes a brief overview of the debate, but she goes a bit further than  my slides dare to go with this:
But I can't ignore the debate between REST and WS-*. I'm a huge proponent of the KISS principle. So I don't recommend using WS-* for all service interactions. If an application doesn't require enterprisey infrastructure semantics, then it's much more appropriate to use a simpler middleware system, such as "plain old XML" (POX) over HTTP. In fact, for applications that require Internet scalability (e.g., mass consumer-oriented services), POX is a much better solution than WS-*.
Sounds like she mixes the Kool-Aid, but she stopped drinking it some time ago.

Anne was responding to a blog post by Mike Herrick, which compared big-and-bloated WS-* to big-and-bloated J2EE. I wonder, now that J2EE has been reborn as JEE5 and EJB as we once knew it is dead, does WS-* need the same treatment? Anne's post seems to imply that WS-* just needs better tools. And, does simply making it possible to build and consume RESTful web services with a WS-* stack, as JEE5 does, go far enough? Maybe I'll get some answers in Mark Hadley's talk on building RESTful Web Services with JAX-WS (JavaOne 2006 TS-1222).

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