Re: Usefulness of WSDL

[James M Snell <[e-mail]>]

Just as a point of clarification: I'm not saying that WSDL is not useful
in general; I'm saying that in my personal experience I've never had any
reason to ever use it in a real-world application. :-)

- James

Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> 
> I see WSDL proposed for some spec in the IETF every so often but
> nobody's ever explained to me what it solves.  James Snell who has more
> experience than me in the matter wrote:
> 
> "Those who are familiar with my history with IBM should know that I was
> once a *major* proponent of the WS-* approach. I was one of the original
> members of the IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit team, I wrote so many
> articles on the subject during my first year with IBM that I was able to
> pay a down payment on my house without touching a dime of savings or
> regular paycheck, and I was involved in most of the internal efforts to
> design and prototype nearly all of the WS-* specifications. However,
> over the last two years I haven’t written a single line of code that has
> anything to do with WS-*. The reason for this change is simple: when I
> was working on WS-*, I never once worked on an application that solved a
> real business need. Everything I wrote back then were demos. Now that
> I’m working for IBM’s WebAhead group, building and supporting
> applications that are being used by tens of thousands of my fellow
> IBMers, I haven’t come across a single use case where WS-* would be a
> suitable fit."
> 
> Anybody got counter-arguments or is this a reasonable indictment?
> 
> Lisa
> 
> [from James' blog: http://www.snellspace.com/wp/?p=798]