I've just returned from InfoWorld's conference, Next-Generation Web Services II: The Applications. One of the most memorable talks, for me, was given by Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole. He predicts a rosy future for basic application integration using Web services. The secret sauce is XML's ability to represent data neutrally. This, he said, drives toward zero the syntactic cost of integration -- which has been the major EAI bottleneck. But O'Toole was much less sanguine about business process integration. What needs to be represented here in XML (and then continously and rapidly modified) are not just data structures, but dynamic systems with control flow, parallelism, complex dependencies, and exceptions. O'Toole wonders if it's even possible to declaratively describe a business process. I share his skepticism. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.]
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/10/24.html#a480