Focused on
Web Services, the opening keynote session from the fourth Forum XML in Paris showed a mismatch between a need for information integration and the current orientation
of Web Services toward application integration.
Highlighting
developments since last year, Frank Gilbane described a general move of focus
from computing to communication as organizations are increasingly concerned by
using their computing power and budget to communicate rather than just
"perform operations." He concluded that "Enterprise Information
Integration" is becoming more important than "Enterprise Application Integration."
Even though
Gilbane affirmed that Web Services would be a key technology in this evolution,
the next keynote speaker, Jean-Marie Chauvet gave an analysis of the motivations
behind Web Services, showing a clear bias toward RPC like applications better
fitted to application integration than information integration.
This
mismatch, clear when comparing the presentations of these two speakers echoes a debate
kicked off by Roger Costello last month on XML-DEV wondering what SOAP could
bring to information interchange over XML document exchanges using more
traditional protocols and infrastructure.
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