Is anyone using the WS-* standards?
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.
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