Chris's Rants

Saturday, May 08, 2004

Stefan sez that this article sucks.

He's absolutely correct. While he won't call out specifics, allow me to point out a couple.
Standards, however, bear watching, and Rhys Jenkins described why WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface standard), originated by IBM and Microsoft, enjoys an upper hand over a rival backed by BEA Systems, Intalio, SAP and Sun Microsystems.
Bzzzt. I don't know whether the article's author is confused about the origins of WSCI or whether Rhys Jenkins is the one who is confused. Clearly, neither the author nor his editor bothered to do any fact checking. WSCI was authored by BEA, Intalio, SAP and Sun not by IBM and Microsoft. I believe that the "rival" mentioned here is BPEL which had its origins with IBM and Microsoft and which has the broad support of the industry as the emerging standard for orchestration.

The author has also apparently taken license with the term "standard". WSCI is not a standard by any stretch of one's imagination. It is a specification published as a W3C member submission. I am soooo tired of IT press hacks who simply refuse to appreciate the importance of the distinction.

Of course, there's also a complete lack of understanding that "orchestration" and "choreography" are two very different concepts. The distinction is subtle but real. In many regards, they can be complementary.

But it gets worse than that.
“Don’t wait for the standards battle to finish; pick one, because you can always generate new WSDL later that will pick up standards you do choose to go with,” he advised. That’s done via WSIF (Web Services Invocation Framework), which lets programmers interact with Web services through WSDL descriptions, allowing switches among SOAP, RMI, IIOP and EJBs.
Just "pick one"? Does it matter which one? Is anyone really that naive?

But, most importantly, the author seems to have missed a key point. That being that you would not want to construct complex choreographies (or orchestrations for that matter) using two-phase commit protocols such as XA. Instead, you need the likes of WS-Business Activity which provides for compensation in the face of failure which is only briefly mentioned in the article despite the fact that it was likely the premise of Rhys Jenkin's presentation.

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