Pete Lacey’s Weblog

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.