Middleware Matters

Over on The Mountain of Worthless Information, Ted Neward comments on my critique of the "Why WSDL Is Not Yet Another Object IDL" article.

In Ted's opinion, I missed an important point that the authors were trying to make: that what really matters is not what WSDL or IDL can each do, but what people actually do with them.

While I agree with Ted that people abuse this stuff, I think he must not have read the articles I linked to from that blog posting, otherwise I doubt he would have claimed I missed that point. Not only have I been making that very point in the Web Services space in writing for at least three years, in fact I was making that same point back in the early days of CORBA, over a decade ago. Back then, one of the most popular questions on CORBA mailing lists and newsgroups was, "How can I turn my [insert favorite programming language here, usually C++ back then] objects into CORBA objects?" My response then was the same as it is now: don't do that. The granularities, levels of coupling, and abstractions of the programming language object are wrong for the CORBA object level, just as they're also wrong for the Web Services level.

So, I invite Ted to read this article and this article, for example. I also invite Ted to recall this exact quote from my previous blog entry:

However, mapping a WSDL interface into an object class is nowhere near as bad as mapping programming language classes into WSDL, which is what a number of WS toolkits do, most notably .NET. That approach fosters in inexperienced users a complete inability to understand what levels of abstraction are appropriate for the Web Services level vs. the programming language level.

Not sure how much clearer I can make it!

Sadly, while Ted, I, and many others agree on this issue, the battle to make it more widely understood is far from over, and may even be pointless, given that Microsoft explicitly promotes this approach with their programming language extensions that allow people to directly declare classes as web services.