Mulling upon repository interop
Microsoft’s Dino Chiesa gently takes IBM to task for some aspects of its WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. His take is that connecting to it requires tightly coupled approaches. He wonders if IBM were to unilaterally create WSDL/SOAP interface for IBM WSRR, if that would not qualify as “an IBM-defined protocol, an IBM-defined schema, an IBM contract.” But, of course, he is representing, Microsoft, and that could color his analysis.
… MS Office defines a WSDL and Schema for any Research Service. It is interoperable, and I have shown Java apps acting as Research Services for MS Word 2003. But the interface itself is non-standard. That is to say, Microsoft defines it unilaterally.
Somehow that situation seems ok, while the situation with IBM defining the interface for its SOA Repository seems inappropriate. HAhahahaha! I find this very challenging terrain to travel over. (I understand my view here may be due to a biased perspective, but I am trying hard to guard against it.) The Research Service interface for MS-Word is a feature of the product. MS Word was not designed to be the center point of a SOA infrastructure, as would a SOA repository. MS Word can best be thought of as an endpoint or end-node in a SOA mesh, and the research service interface is just one small artifact that affects that end-node, not the entire mesh. Furthermore, the Research Service interface is small and simple, in comparison to the richer interface you’d need for a SOAP repository. Because of all this, the MS-Office Research Service interface need not be an internationally sanctioned standard, while it seems to me that because a SOA Service Repository does play that central role, and is a much more complex service, it ought to have network interfaces that are based on multi-vendor standards. Is this hypocrisy? I don’t think so.
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WSRR and Interop - on All About Interop Blog
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