Re: Usefulness of WSDL

["Mark Baker" <[e-mail]>]

On 11/9/07, Lisa Dusseault <[e-mail]> 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?

Nope, sounds about right to me.  IMO, the whole notion of
service-specific interfaces - the reason WSDL exists - is an anethema
to Internet scale and so has no place in the IETF.  It also encourages
bad practice around exposing implementation details, such as the
current schema support by the device (because we all know, those never
change over time 8-).

That said, if some spec author wants to use it, I don't see any need
to prevent them from doing so, so long as the emphasis of the spec is
on the protocol.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.         http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies  http://www.coactus.com