Larry Williams' Weblog : Weblog

Larry Williams' Weblog : Weblog: "Thoughts on Web Services
My personal feelings about web services are mixed. It's good to have open standards. But I feel like we are making the same mistakes as we made with EJBs. Only this time on a grander scale. Since almost all programming languages are involved. Below is a list of some of the problems.
Deployment descriptors, stubs and skeletons. If there's a tool that generates deployment descriptors, stubs and skeletons automatically. Then why can't this step be hidden from the developer?
Bad reference implementation. Axis is the Struts of Java web services.
Standards first then implementation. If I could choose it would be the other way around. You have to have something that works first.
Performance nightmare. Serialize and deserialize XML. Send it over a network. What else do we need? I guess local web service interfaces :)
Not choosing the right tool for the job. Choosing SOAP over for example REST or RPC just because it's a standard and over hyped.
Anyway I stumbled upon XFire the other day. XFire is a next-generation java SOAP framework. Compared to Axis it seems lightyears ahead. You can create a web service in 5 lines of code. Which is almost as easy as SOAPpy for Python. Too bad that I've not had time to try XFire yet. I'm sure I will soon. ( Jan 27 2005, 04:13:18 PM EST ) Permalink Comments [0] "