(2004-03-29) Box On Web Services Specs

Don Box on the proliferation of Web Services specs. XML (Extensible Markup Language), a technology at the heart of Web services, is by now "pretty stable," Box said, and "the Holy Trinity" of Web services - meaning SOAP, WSDL (Web ServicesDescriptionLanguage) and UDDI (Universal Description Discovery And Integration) - are complete enough for most developers to use. Other specifications are being hammered out to address security, management, orchestration and other aspects of Web services, but he urged developers not to wait for the results. "I strongly encourage you not to wait for all of this stuff to settle down. The important stuff has settled down sufficiently that unless you are building the enterprise InformationBus (Message Bus) for your company, we are done. And if you're building that (information bus), wait a few months and that will settle down by the end of the year," he said.