Vendors: Web Services Talk Must Give Way To Action

Well, all that chatter about SOAP, WSDL, UDDI had better turn into reality soon, or the industry's in big trouble, according to industry executives.

"People will pull the plug on overpromised, underdelivered technologies," said Don Box, Web services architect at Microsoft.

Speaking at the XML Web Services One show here, Box and IBM Director of E-Business Standards Strategy Robert Sutor were in violent agreement that the time is ripe for Web services to become a reality.

Sutor touted Web services toolkits from both companies as key to real-life rollouts, even as proposed standards such as WS-Security, WS-Attachments etc. wind their way through the standards-setting process.

IBM and Microsoft, the self-proclaimed leaders in Web services standards, trumpeted the ability of their widely divergent application server technologies to work interchangeably as proof that Web services can work.

In a demo, they showed a brokerage application in which the second-tier broker and third-tier back-end systems by either company could be interchanged without affecting the delivery of services--stock quotes, portfolio information--to the user.

"Microsoft and a company from New York got together yesterday and showed their software working together and this was newsworthy. This is a sad, sad, state of affairs," Box noted.

"If we have this meeting two years from now, we're screwed. We've got to focus on Web services technology not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end," he noted.

On the plus side, hundreds of vendors are on the Web services standards bandwagon, but some of their implementations remain sketchy, Box said.

Microsoft itself "doesn't do a great job integrating UDDI [into its products . . . it's kind of tacked onto the side," Box acknowledged.