This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: WS as CORBA - the meme spreads Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Well, well. I've been saying that WS* is the new CORBA for awhile now, with the only significant difference being port 80. Looks like the IT press is starting to think similar thoughts - have a look at Alexander Krampf's op-ed in SD Times:

Is it me, or does all of this seem eerily familiar? I can't help comparing today's Web services hype to the CORBA boom of the 1990s.

What happened and which technological revolution did I miss that makes all this a reality? It must have been XML and SOAP. But wait 14while XML is a great way to store and exchange information, it does so in a very verbose manner. And SOAP is really just another RPC protocol that happens to use XML instead of a binary data representation.

Deploying Web services requires a stack that includes XML parsers, Web servers and additional infrastructure. I just don't see that huge a difference between what Web services offers to me today and what CORBA offered to me five years ago. Back then, I needed to know IDL (Interface Definition Language). Today, I need to know all the different Web services schemas. And keeping track of the various standards and specifications is another enormous challenge.

I recall watching the ParcPlace distribution team trying to keep track of the vast array of CORBA services that were spinning out in the early to mid 90's - and believe me, the view of WS* specs rolling out looks like the same thing all over again.

This is probably the best advice on WS I've read yet (it's a good general point as well):

Web services are yet another tool in our increasingly large arsenal of integration approaches. They have many admirable characteristics and will make a valuable contribution in helping businesses operate more efficiently and serve customers better. Let's just make sure that when we choose Web services, we do so because they are the appropriate solution for each integration problem and not because we have a free Web services stack sitting around with nothing to do.