On WS-Opposition

Tim Bray, who has spent the last several months crapping on the WS-* stack has agreed to shut up or put up. Thank God.

If Tim and team are able to create something better than the Service Oriented Standards (S.O.S.), then I'm the first one on board. I'd love to see Sun get active. Their pissing and moaning that they weren't invited to the party is just too old. So, here are my recommendations to S.O.S. V-2:

1. Start with a vocabulary. Write down the words you will need. Don't write them in XML - write them in English (or other non-XML markup).
2. Publish your vocabulary in the simplest manner possible.
3. Ask smart people if the words and domains are correct.
4. Compare the list to existing vocabularies (J2EE, .Net, etc.); identify the delta.
5. Apply the 80/20 rule to the words, cutting as many as possible.
6. Create a constraint based architecture. Never say "You MAY", only "YOU SHALL NOT".
7. Create profiles of constraint architectures (SMB, Enterprise, etc.)
8. Publish the candidate architectures along with the vocabularies.
9. Wait for people to crap on S.O.S. V-2; they will.
10. Defend your ideas, learn from the debate and prepare for V-3.

Good Luck. Jeff