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Address: http://www.soapware.org/discuss/msgReader$21

By: Dave Winer (dave@...)

<i>There's a discussion among the leadership of the W3C on the future of WSDL,
which is an acronym for Web Services Description Language. The discussion itself
is off the record, but my point of view is not. Here are some comments I posted
over the weekend.</i>
<ol>
<li>WSDL was designed in secret behind closed doors by IBM and Microsoft,
without participation of independent developers.<p>
<li>It can only work in static environments such as Java and .Net and not in
dynamic environments that are popular with Web developers, including but not
limited to Perl, Python, PHP, and UserLand Frontier.<p>
<li>Today WSDL is not a basis for interop. If there is interop it's only between
Java and .Net.<p>
<li>There can be no significant support for this by independent developers
because it shuts them out.<p>
<li>These companies want the endorsement of the W3C. They're trying to redefine
the rules so that only their products can satisfy them. This is a good test of
the W3C's independence from the big companies. <p>
<li>Philosophically this faceoff is directly comparable to the tightly-coupled
and managed hypertext environments that were theorized before the
loosely-coupled HTML-HTTP web came along, and wiped out all the theories. SOAP
alone, without the tight coupling promised by WSDL, is being widely deployed,
without Microsoft and IBM. This must irk them. But don't thwart the spirit of
the Web, it's still alive, in this venue. <p>
<li>Tell Microsoft and IBM to go back to the drawing board. It's the right thing
to do, maybe next time around they won't create such a self-serving
specification that goes against the interests of independent developers. <p>
</ol>
Dave