News
Java father Gosling on Web services
- By Jack Vaughan
- June 8, 2002
[WEEK OF JUNE 3, 2002]- While Sun Microsystems works as hard as any vendor to enable
next-generation Web services middleware architectures, company
scientist James Gosling, a Sun vice president and fellow as well
as the father of the Java language, cautions that Web services are
not really all that novel.
"The current spin on Web services isn't anything new; services have
been part of distributed computing world for 20 to 30 years," Gosling
said in an interview with "Application Development Trends," which is
covering the XML Web Services One conference in San Jose, Calif.
Moreover, Gosling points to what he sees as architectural flaws in the
Web services model that is currently carried forward by proponents of
the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
"They say SOAP is lightweight, but they have left out a lot of
things," he said. "It doesn't address issues such as how you cope
with errors. It's left up to the reader [to fill in the blanks]."
The real issues in Web services may be up to business unit leaders
to decide, indicated Gosling. Companies could make their inner APIs
available to the public today, he continued, but such decisions will
only be made after much deliberation.
About the Author
Jack Vaughan is former Editor-at-Large at Application Development Trends magazine.