Back when SOA was the new, big buzz word there was a lot of talk around the WS-* standards for Web services.  Our company and many other vendors providing products in the space were doing a lot of talking about which standards were relevant, when would they be needed, and how they would work within an enterprise.

 It’s been several years now since most of them were proposed, and from my experience with talking with our customers, there is not widespread adoption or even need.  The one exception to that statement would be WS-Security.  There is always a need for security, and at a basic level encryption when doing any type of messaging.  When speaking with enterprise architects and developers, security always enters the conversation at some point.  However, one that had a lot of talk in the early days but hasn’t turned out to show real demand is WS-Reliable Messaging.  We have found that most people would rather rely on their enterprise transport mechanism such as a queing or JMS implementation.  Is there real need out there for this standard and we’re simply not seeing it?

There are also standards like WS-Addressing (needed for WS-Reliable Messaging) and WS-Transaction.  Neither of these has come up in a conversation that I have had for at least a year.  Are these viable, necessary standards that vendors should strive to attain compliance to?  Are there other standards that are absolutely required to implement Web services within an enterprise environment?  I guess until the masses rise up and declare the need, they might just show up as another check-box item when evaluating vendor products.

In a recent blog post, Alex Cameron with EDS talks about SOA becoming the dominant architecture for Software Development. I could definitely see how this could be true. It seems software development has progressed and chosen certain styles of programming languages for a reason. As Java and C++ instrumented separate implementation and interfaces, developers realized they could more easily use another developer’s work without having to know what was going on under the covers. Companies and managers saw that they could more efficiently manage and control large projects with various teams interacting with each other. It led to easier to understand software, more productive development teams, and even documenting the software became simpler as the interface was a great guide as to what the component did.

So what is the extension of that? Not only would that developer like to use someone else’s work without knowing anything about it, but they also want to have access to work done on other OSes, on different hardware, in different languages, and all without having to understand the details. So the previous model of finding a .h file or some other class description in the appropriate programming language would be replaced by a search of WSDLs for the functionality needed. No longer would the developer be limited by language, platform, or in some cases, even geography or affiliation.