Here's one popular definition of insanity: "Do the same thing, expect a different result." Now consider the following partial list of proposed standards for Web services: WS-Addressing, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Attachments, WS-Context, WS-Coordination, WS-Eventing, WS-Federation, WS-Reliability, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Routing, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Transaction, and WS-Trust. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]The original title of this column was WS-WorldPeace, so I've used that title here because I still like it better. But this is the same column as the one in the current print edition of InfoWorld entitled Web services alphabet soup. In the column, I interview Microsoft's John Shewchuk on the question of why this round of small, modular specifications is arguably not a replay of past sins, and how Indigo intends to help developers get a handle on "composable complexity."
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/02/23.html#a926