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August 25, 2004
What went wrong with WebServices?
So what went wrong with web services? By this point we were supposed to be riding the ground swell of the huge wave. I've been working on web-services for about 4 years and watched the hype and heard all the promises. Initially the watchword was "don't make the mistakes of corba". But as the standards have grown we have repeated all the mistakes. I think there are three fundamental problems with WebServices:
- WSDL (too complex)
- XML-Schema
- Multi-protocol support
WSDL WSDL is just too complex and references XML Schema. These days people are just documenting there WebServices by hand and not using WSDL to describe them.
XML-Schema We just need to move to Relax-NG , enough said.
Return to HTTP I think the multi protocol step was a bad one. We should have defined Web Services as XML over HTTP and left it at that. Removing DTD's was a good thing and SOAP provides some nice extensibility but you are only ever going to interop with the basic SOAP/XML over HTTP. The move to multi-protocol support has led to the corbafication of web services.
Posted by Chris at August 25, 2004 09:59 AM