Pete Lacey’s Weblog

Whenever the word ontology is used in a technical context, what is being promoted is likely of limited practical value.

Pete’s 1^st Law of Computing

Eric Newcomer and I have exchanged a few emails today, and it seems that I did not fully appreciate the scope of the W3C Enterprise Computing Workshop.  If I understand it properly now, it goes something like this.

W3C members have issues surrounding enterprise computing.  Not just distributed computing, but the typical concerns around transactions, scalability, high availability, and so on.  Not only that they’re also dealing with 15, 20, and 25 year old technology that works just fine but is getting more and more difficult to maintain and doesn’t play well with others. Finally, there’s the issue of interconnecting these systems to each other, to partners, and to the Web.

As everyone knows these issues can be pretty thorny. And today there are any number of places where one can go to for help, such as to Microsoft and IBM, conferences and colleagues, books and the Web, and even research companies like Burton Group. What this workshop is considering, however, is whether the W3C, in addition to its core mission, can act as a focal point for organizing and filtering both the enterprise’s needs and the industry’s response.

In this light, my position paper was simplistic; only addressing the connectivity issue, and by extension elements of scalability and availability. And while I, of course, don’t see a play for WS-* in all this, and do see a definite win for REST, that is only part of the problem.

I confess to having looked forward to a good old fashioned Donnybrook. But now that the Marquess of Queensbury rules are in effect, the workshop promises to be much more productive. I’ll write up a summary next week.

In order to attend the W3C Workshop on Web of Services For Enterprise Computing, you have to submit a position paper.  I got mine in at the 11th hour, and it’s just been posted: Targeting the Enterprise means Ignoring the World.  If you’ve already read Nick Gall’s position, there’s no real reason to read mine, as it makes the same point using all new words.  The upshot is: why should the world wide web consortium be concerned with enterprise integration headaches?

Via Jérôme: Yesterday Sun proposed a new JSR (311) to provide a simple REST API for Java. Initial thoughts:

1. Cool!
2. The servlet API is not ideal, this is needed.
3. I hope they don’t screw it up (see JAX-WS).

Update: Based on Marc Hadley’s post, maybe we won’t have to worry about #3.

Update 2: Steve Loughran and Stefan Tilkov have important things to say.  Steve says he will join the expert group if I do (seeing that Stefan, Mark Baker, and Bill de Hora already have), so I submitted a request.  Steve?

I’m sure everyone saw Tim’s post today, but while looking for something official on BEA’s commercial support for Spring, I also saw this: http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/wgroth2/archive/2007/02/web_20_rest_and.html. There is absolutely nothing amazing about the code shown. In fact, there’s nothing particularly BEA-y about it either. But what is just a little interesting is that the VP of BEA Workshop felt compelled to show that they too can do REST.