As I’ve written before, I spent two days last week on the SOA Days 2005 conference. Despite being the “Technology Conference”, it dealt much more with business issues than with technical aspects — which, in a way, is a good thing: I agree with the majority of the attendees that technology matters much less than having a convincing business case and getting the organizational aspects right.

One of the highlights for me was getting a chance to chat with IONA’s Eric Newcomer for an hour or so (he blogged about the conference as well) — we had a nice discussion about RPC-style vs. message-style Web services, the importance of a service contract (specifically WSDL), dynamically and policy-driven message processing … what I learned, among other things, is that a) it’s not a good idea to get into an argument about the history of standards with Eric (unless you care to lose) and b) his views about the importance of message-level API access and the features of some of IONA’s products are not exactly in line, to say the least.