Web Things, by Mark Baker

Web Things, by Mark Baker responds to my comment about interfaces. While I agree with his next post around document interfaces I feel strongly that the formalism brought by WSDL allows the specification of public interfaces and requires little else. The public interfaces can be document or rpc style both have their place but the need to have a standard human/machine readable interface description is necessary.

I do however share his and others concerns that WS-xxxx is heading into the same pit of complexity that CORBA descended into. At the time of CORBAs brief hay day I was at Tibco (then Teknekron Software Systems) building loosely coupled self describing message based systems. The lack of interoperability and describable interfaces was a drawback - so we built our own dynamic object language, and our own security etc.... Standards are useful to ensure we all use compatible tools but the tools (standards) should not be over designed as the art is in the wielding of the tools not the tool itself.