Sanjiva Weerawarana on Open Source SOA Middleware

In this interview, Stefan Tilkov talks to Sanjiva Weerawarana about web
services and REST, about core standards that are essential for web
services standards, open source SOA tooling, scripting languages and
web services, and the strategy of WSO2 in providing open source
middleware. [As to key WS-* specifications:] The most important one
from a service oriented perspective, is the thing that is used to
describe what the service does. WSDL is the one that people are using
for that. There is a whole diversion of the spec that widely deployed,
WSDL 1.1. But WSDL 2.0 is a hugely improved spec; it's really not even
a WSDL, it's a completely different language in many, many ways.
Unfortunately adoption has been slow yet, it just came up this year, and
it is going to take some time to major vendors have to got to revisions
to get to that point, if they want to get there they have to have a much
better way to describe services. The other key spec is of course is the
base wire protocol that everybody uses which is SOAP, and there is a
series of specs that extend SOAP with security, with reliability,
transactions, and so there is WS-Security, WS-SecurePolicy and WS-Secure
Conversation and WS-Trust, those are the four security specs that matter.
On reliable messaging there is something called WS-ReliableMessaging,
in transactions there is something called the WS-AtomicTransaction,
WS-BusinessAgreement and WS-Coordination. There are many applications
where you never touched reliable messaging or transactions. So a large
percentage of the people who built web services would never actually
end up invoking these things, and in fact most people who actually use
web services shouldn't be knowing about these specs. This is the
underneath infrastructure that people like me who build web services
should know about...