Sean McGrath -- WS-Yikes

Sean McGrath weighs in on a post by Gregor in which he states that this quote:

Therefore, I propose to many of my clients to use the WS-* standards as a checklist for their designs. I generally do not recommend they use WS-Addressing or WS-ReliableMessaging (or at least not right out of the gate). I do, however, challenge them by asking, "What is your strategy to track messages in case of error?" or "How do you intend to support asynchronous messaging?" The answer has sometimes little to do with Web Services. For example, the answer to reliable asynchronous messaging might be to use JMS or MQ or another middleware that ensures guaranteed delivery of asynchronous messages. And that's OK. ...

"resonates strongly" with his approach.

Indeed, I whole-heartedly agree to a point. It is all well and good to leverage JMS or WebSphere MQ to effect reliable, asynchronous messaging within the enterprise, but to achieve the necessary levels of interoperability between enterprises, you need an interoperability protocol(s) such as provided by WS-Addressing and WS-Reliable Messaging. I wrote a paper last year describing the role these protocols will likely have in the context of existing and widely deployed messaging infrastructures.

Where I do agree is that the way forward for customers implementing SOA now is to begin by leveraging a JMS provider or WebSphere MQ as has been suggested, especially in the case of EAI projects.