April 04, 2004

UML to model Web Services?

(edit) | 11:57 AM | permalink | (1 comments, 2 trackbacks) | Categories: Model Driven Architecture , Web Services

Eric Newcomer answers some of my criticisms of his recent posting on MDA.

Great to see that we're not that far apart, and kudos to Eric for openly acknowledging a slight change of mind — something you don't find very often. Interestingly, many opponents of code generation tend to compromise on the viability of doing one-shot generation without later on going to back to the model, while I believe that this is even worse than not doing code generation at all.

One interesting point remains: Eric believes UML to unsuited for modeling Web services. I see no reason why this should be the case. I strongly agree that Web services are not distributed objects, but of course UML can be used to model non-OO concepts as well. In fact, we are using UML in one of our projects to model Web services, and we definitely do not take a distributed objects approach.

Maybe I should illustrate this using an example. Anyone got a nice Web service I could use? ;-)

Readers have left 3 Comments:
Comment from Eric Newcomer at Apr 11, 2004 11:27 PM:

The short answer is that Web services are designed for use across software domains, originally across the Internet, but also within an Intranet. UML was designed for development within a domain, and actually only certain domains (i.e. object oriented but not message queues). Web services design must focus on the data, or schema, to be shared, rather than on the interface. It's true that you can use UML for Web services, just like you can use a piece of string and two tin cans for a telephone. But that doesn't mean the technology was intended to be used that way, nor that it's the right fit for purpose. More details coming on my blog http://www.iona.com/blogs/newcomer/.

Trackback from Eric Newcomer's Weblog at Apr 12, 2004 8:18 PM:

In my recent postings, I've asserted that UML and MDA are not well suited for Web services. There are two main reasons: Web services are intended for cross-domain interoperability Web services need a data model, not an object model Stefan Tilkov says t...

Read more in UML/MDA -- Not Well Suited for Web Services »

Trackback from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff at Apr 12, 2004 11:29 PM:

Eric Newcomer follows up on our discussion with regards to UML's suitability for Web services. First of all, Eric states that UML is not suited very well for Web services, since they are typically used for integration scenarios across application domai...

Read more in Web Services Integration Scenarios and UML »

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