Jiri’s Notepad

Alan Mather quoting Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz:

5. Web services may collapse under its own weight.
No one at the conference said this. Those are my words. I’m beginning to feel that all the disparate web service specs and fragmented standards activities are way out of control. Want proof? Ask one of your IT folks to define web services. Ask two others. They won’t match. We asked folks around the room - it was pretty grim. It’s either got to be simplified, or radically rethought.

… and adding a comment of his own:

(For the last couple of years I’ve listened to folks in government talk up web services and only a few diss them, notably the chief wizard on Gateway, Simon, who always said that web services were going to be more pain than good for a long time. As far as I know, the Government Gateway was one of the first web services to be made available anywhere in the public sector, anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t mean it was easy - and it was never clear how government would scale to 100s of web services offering 1000s of discrete operations. We could all see a scenario where, just like websites, there would be too many web services doing too little for too few people, but consuming vast amounts of money all the same.

Folks seem to have moved on from web services though and now talk about Service Oriented Architectures - something I understand even less and worry about even more. We know, from history, that whenever the technology industry needs to sell us more stuff, they change the paradigm and start inventing new words that us buyers have to translate and figure out and, ultimately, spend money on.

It’s been a neat trick for years and it looks like it’s being tried again. But maybe Jonathan is calling “uncle” on this one. There’s no money to be made here until it gets simpler to design, build, implement and *especially* secure and operate them.