People talking about the forest of WS-* Standards.
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There is something qualitatively different about the WS menagerie: modularity.
"We took a building block approach," Shewchuk says. "WS-Security is a small
10-page spec. You could knock out an implementation over the weekend in Perl or
Python." That's because WS-Security doesn't try to do everything; it's just a
framework for securing messages. Likewise, WS-Addressing paves the way for asynchronous,
transport-neutral communication. And WS-Trust lays the groundwork for a range of
security protocols. What makes this modular approach possible, Shewchuk says, is XML itself. "Before XML, what always ended up destroying our protocol stacks was fixed-offset dependencies." At the time, you couldn't modify or extend packets without breakage. But XML packets are flexible, accordion-like structures. Individually they can grow; collectively they can be rearranged. This "composable architecture," Shewchuk argues, is something new in the realm of communication protocols. -- John Udell (John Shewchuk, Architect on the Indigo Team at Microsoft) |
