Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff

SOA Days 2005

Deutsche Post, formerly “only” the German postal service, now one of the world’s largest logistics companies and owners of DHL, hosted a 2-day conference in Bonn these past two days. The conference has left me with mixed feelings — here, as well as at a number of other events I visited in the past year, there were a lot of talks that could just as easily have been given 3 or 5 years ago, just with the major buzzword (component, EAI) replaced by SOA. Still, there were some very good talks; and the presentation of Deutsche Post’s own SOA was very well received.

For me, a personal highlight was being able to talk to Sun’s Mark Hapner after his talk about Java Business Integration (JBI, JSR 208). While I remain unconvinced that the world really needs this particular standard, we spent a little time talking about Web services, the role of the Web in building applications, and a few other things I’ll refrain from blogging about right now.

One thing I found very interesting was his view about eventing and notification standards such as WS-Eventing and WS-Notification which was, to phrase it lightly, a little on the unfavorable side. He is undoubtedly right that for delivering notifications in Internet scale, RSS or Atom are much more suitable solutions … so I hereby officially suggest to come up with a few ways to plug syndication technologies into the WS stack. Updates to entities in a UDDI registry as well as integration into content-based routing solutions are the first that cross my mind. WS-Atom!

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