WS-MD? No thanks

WS-MD, another Web Services spec.

Is it just me but does anybody else out there think these guys should take a few deep breaths and review where they have got to, how they got there and why?

The reason I ask is that if this is the future of web services it looks awfully complicated and complicated specs in this industry often turn into either (a) hypernovas of non-interoperable (read "proprietary" implementations) or (b) withered leaves on a vine.

Back up the truck there Tonto! Get back to basics. You have URIs, you have XML messages. You need reliable, asynchronous message exchange. Its not complicated. Its a simple HTTP exchange pattern on top of a MOM. Synchronous? That is just fast asynchronous. Remember LU 6.2. Remember MQSeries?

Speed? Nacht! You can compile away asynchronous messaging into direct point to point API calls at runtime. Its not complicated.

You started at the wrong end of the pipe. SOAP always was and always will be and API-centric worldview.

That is not the future.

That is the past.

Re-implemented badly.

Sometimes I wonder. I really do.

Len Bullard Blog

"English is the language of international documentation. Master the art of the run on sentence that separates the subject with great green windy sunlit dry hot muggy purple modifiers from the verb and split infinitives through conjunctions that require GPS coordinates to find the period at the not quite end of the densely populated by obscure and not often used terminology that implements the verb."

Yes folks. Len has a blog. Subscribed.

Nice, simple, harmless port 80. Yeah, right.

This weeks ITWorld e-Business in the Enterprise article: Web services, firewalls and steganography.

Handling big XML files

Uche Ogbuji has published a useful article of techniques for handling large XML docs.

The sadly neglected (by me) pyxie library provides "sparse trees". Simply put, you process and XML instance event-by-event until you come across the start of an element you would like to treat as a tree. Then you fire up the tree-builder purely for the sub-tree.

The also sadly neglected (by me) xpipe open source XML pipelining architecture has the concept of scatter/gather processing which is very useful for handling large XML docs.

Notes on a vacation from cyberspace

This weeks e-Business in the Enterprise Column: Notes on an annual vacation from cyberspace and the pain of re-entry.