Sometime TSS Interop Blog guest blogger Adrian Trenaman  has reported on the doings at TSS Java Symposium Europe at Barcelona. There, he and Ted Neward discussed Pragmatic XML web services with CXF and .Net. And he discusses much more. His take on keynoter Martin Fowler’s take on WS-* is noteworthy. Don’t’ throw the baby out with the bathwater is the bottom line.

There is serious disillusionment around WS-*. Martin Fowler refers to the extended suite of Web Services specifications antagonistically as “WS Death Star”, raising questions about the validity and veracity of specs that are barely-implemented and infrequently used. For example: is WS-Transactions really necessary? Distributed transactions are hard enough as it is, why should doing it with web services make it any better? What about WS-Reliable Messaging? There are lots of applications out there where sending SOAP or XML over JMS is more than enough already: no WS-RM required! I’m a pragmatist at heart, and much of this kind of thought really does resonate with me, Still, I’m not keen to throw the baby out with the bath water: there’s some good stuff in WS-*. I found myself musing at the conference about what a a tragedy it would be if we as an industry decide to bin WS-* and start all over again, only to run into the same problems (again) a few years down the line. Hmmm. Let me be clearer: if you’re going to mock WS-*, then earn the right to do so first by suggesting a viable alternative.

http://blogs.iona.com/sos/2007/07/hola_barcelona_tales_from_the.html