Reconcilable differences
The extent of crystal ball-gazing about UDDI's future, and the fact that vendors are promoting Web services even though they're still very much works in progress, suggest the current hype over the technology has been driven more by vendors' desperate need to escape the current downturn than by genuine customer need.
"We're very close to being there," concedes Doug Tidwell, IBM's Web services evangelist. "One of the main ideas behind Web services is that they give you a fairly lightweight way to move structured data from one place to another. It's the next logical step for XML, and we're working very hard to make sure there are standards that people can work to."
"There are still some issues," he adds optimistically, "but it's much better today than it was six months ago. The next step for us and the rest of the industry is the [UDDI] registry piece, where there's a lot of work to be done. Right now, the main thing we're doing is encouraging people to just start working with this."
Although this conceded level of immaturity might introduce enough uncertainty to have risk managers shaking in their boots, developers have rapidly warmed to the ideological potential of Web services.
Indeed, many have already spent long days building ad hoc Web services around XML and SOAP, which are far more mature than the more fantastic aspects of Web services such as UDDI.
Just which vision of Web services wins out in the end is anybody's guess. Although J2EE proponents are quick to evangelise that environment's benefits, Microsoft's heft in development circles--and its commitment to support a variety of development environments--has won considerable interest among those investigating Web services.
A survey of 813 North American developers by Evans Data Corporation, released in April, showed that .NET had 28 percent of the market while J2EE was neck-and-neck at 27 percent.
"Custom code" ranked third, at 11 percent, while proprietary EAI products were named by just 4.2 percent of respondents. Fully 82.5 percent of respondents planned to use XML interfaces in at least some of their applications, and 19 percent will use XML in all their applications.
A survey by Merrill Lynch, also conducted earlier this year, confirmed Evans Data's results, with two-thirds of 100 surveyed European CIOs investing in Web services, but allegiance evenly split between .NET and J2EE.
Sun, true to form, has been openly critical of Microsoft's strategy for enabling Web services development. Sun's Stern, for one, criticises C# for what he sees as a relatively lax security model that lets developers circumvent built-in protections if they know what they're doing: "these are programming conveniences, but a disaster for people who manage deployments. We're trying to drive some developer discipline here."
In May, a separate Evans Data Corporation survey found Microsoft's C# language was already being used by 12 percent of North American software developers, up from 7 percent of developers six months earlier.
The language's penetration is expected to pass 24 percent within the next year, portending massiveacceptance of .NET as a concept and C# as the facilitator of that concept.
Just what effect the introduction of a major new software infrastructure will have on businesses remains to be seen. Certainly, the facilitation of full distributed development--and the potential integration of external code as necessary--will force companies to become even more stringent with their development and testing discipline.
Development industry guru Grady Booch, long serving as chief scientist within XML and tools developer Rational Software, believes Web services are pointing developers in the right direction despite the attendant complexity they introduce.
"Software development is fundamentally, wickedly, pervasively hard, and no one technology is going to change that," Booch says.
"Reuse at the small scale has always been oversold as a benefit of any coding technique; at best, we can whack away at some inefficiencies, which means doing more model driven developments. There's sound technology behind [Web services], which I see as a natural progression in raising the level of abstraction of systems. Business experts are very well versed in arcane rules of [business], but you'll never train them to be programmers. Instead, Web services let you bring the code up to them."
