Last week I attended and presented the BEA position at the W3C Web of Services for Enterprise Computing. I don't want to go through all the various discussion as I think Paul, Jonathan, and Eric do a great job.
I found much of it interesting and useful. Real-world discussion of how much traction SOAP and WSDL are getting in B2B and enterprise scenarios was great. I liked the WS-Core WG idea. A number of folks commented positively on a couple of the W3C TAG findings I'm working on: versioning and state. However, I had a couple of disappointments.
There was almost no discussion about how enterprise computing is different from "non-enterprise computing". I argued it might be something like higher trust in well-behaved clients, so state, security, extensibility, etc. might be different. But almost no follow through, though maybe just because I presented midway through the 2nd day.
Given all the angst about Web architecture vs Web services architecture, I was also surprised that there was no support for technical reconciliation. I suggested WADL (Web application description language), to help with enterprises and the desperate perl/python hacker building stronger typed REST services. And for the flipside, I suggested improved SOAP to URI/XML bindings so SOAP/WSDL services would be more easily consumable by REST clients. There were 2 votes (including mine) for doing WADL, and 2 votes against doing WADL. I'm still surprised that there wasn't more support for technical ways of bringing the two architectures together. Perhaps this is because the way the voting structure was done, which was pick 2 items out of about 15.
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