From xml.coverpages.org,
this
announcement that yet more strangeness is happening in the Grid
(be afraid all you good Web Services people, these Grid guys are our
(logical) neighbours).
The first of these specifications is WS-BaseFaults which "defines
an XML Schema type for a base fault, along with rules for how this
fault type is used by Web services." So what problem does this solve
which hasn't already been addressed by the SOAP fault mechanism?
Anyone using WS-BaseFault will extend it to their own needs anyway
surely?
The second specification is equally baffling. It is called
WS-ServiceGroup and its goal is to "standardize the terminology,
concepts, message exchanges, WSDL and XML needed to express the
aggregations of Web services and resources as defined by the implied
resource pattern." Leaving out the fact that the
implied resource pattern is not very SOA-ish,
what does it mean for services to be aggregated together? That is
what applications do when they consume services! Services
don't declare that they are part of a group otherwise it ties them
together and dashes any hopes of achieving loose coupling (well any
hopes left after implied resource pattern has done its worst of
course).
Today's Web Services super-hero: SOA
Today's Web Services arch-villain: Grid Computing