In-Depth
Q&A with Kevin Dick: Where is XML headed?
- By Jack Vaughan
- July 1, 2002
ADT's Jack Vaughan recently went to the source to uncover the path of enterprise XML in years to come. Kevin Dick, shown here, leads The Middletier Group, is long-time chair of the XML Web Services One Conference, and is the author of "XML: A Manager's Guide," which is due soon in a new edition.
Q: What has surprised you in the development of XML?
A:
Back in 1999, there was the beginning of a split between XML for content and XML
for data. Since XML is essentially a profile of SGML, it definitely came out of
the content camp, but it was picked up to help solve a number of
interoperability problems by people in the data camp.
On the data side, one of the things that people believed in 1999 that turned
out to be correct was that XML would be a platform for defining standard data
formats that parties could easily use to exchange information. If you look at
that today, there's lots of interoperable XML. One of the things that caught me
a little bit by surprise was the use of XML as a protocol and methods-wrapping
technology at the lower layer. We [also] saw the explosion of SOAP, which caught
me a little bit by surprise. I knew it was possible, but I didn't think it was
going to be the commercial success it was.
Q: What splits have appeared among XML data handlers?
A:
There's something of a split between the programming data camp and the database
data camp -- the people who are worried about moving XML data in and out of
application programs, and those who are worried about moving XML data in and out
of databases. That's one of the reasons why I think XML schema turned out to be
so complex, because you had to accommodate the requirements of the type systems
and the programming models of both application programs and database programs.
There's also, as you know, sort of a split between the 'low-level guys' and
the 'high-level guys' -- those who are worried about business agreements between
two parties, and the people who are worried about data agreements. There's a
separation between business analysts and programmers. And, as it turns out, in
order to get a nice interoperable format between two companies, you have to have
these people working together. It doesn't do you much good to have these
well-defined business concepts that don't have the appropriate supporting data
structures in your interoperability format. And it certainly doesn't help you to
have nice interoperable data structures that don't have the appropriate
relations to the business concepts you want to talk about.
There's definitely a complete difference in perspective. You sort of see this
outgrowth in XML messaging; there's a split between people that have a lot of
different terms for capturing the same concept. Some people call it fine-grained
vs. coarse-grained messaging, I call it distributed object vs. EDI-type
messaging. There is SOAP where you're invoking methods on objects vs. SOAP where
you're sending big blocks of business data back and forth.
Unfortunately, those two perspectives have been grossly confused in the
design of the XML messaging infrastructure. So they're trying to accommodate
both of those perspectives. That's a laudable goal, because it's nice to have
the same infrastructure do two jobs -- you only need to learn one thing. But
this is why there's a lot of confusion about whether SOAP is replacing CORBA or
EDI.
Q: We'd think that, if you were trying to replace CORBA with SOAP,
the more things you add on, the less lightweight it would be.
A:
This is, in fact, precisely what's happening. What we have right now is Web
services that are completely isomorphic to the CORBA infrastructure. We have a
wire protocol, we have an interface definition language, and we have a directory
query language and a discovery language. Those are, respectively, SOAP for the
wire protocol, WSDL for the interface definition language and UDDI for discovery
and directory.
Q: Is that bad or good, or just one of those things?
A:
It's just one of those things. No matter how hard you try to have a grand
design, things always evolve. People started out with SOAP as a very lightweight
model -- one of the reasons why SOAP is so good for so many things is because it
doesn't actually do very much. It's a structure for doing other things. To dive
down to the technical depths for a second, you have the body and the header
separation. SOAP in and of itself doesn't define any header tags, or do any
security or transactions or any of those things. All it does is allow you to
send a message with parameters and a target to another computer. But it has this
extensible header where you can sort of proprietarily extend SOAP with
transactions, security, quality of service and all of those good things. And so
that's made it useful for lots of different problems. But you have to pile on a
bunch of extra stuff to actually make it feasible in a large-scale architecture.
In my experience, consulting for companies that are building XML-based
architectures, the confusion between which type of messaging -- the distributed
object flavor or the EDI flavor -- is a tremendous decision people have to make
that they don't realize they have to make or that not all of them realize they
have to make. There's actually quite an impassioned discussion in the
distributed computing community over which of these styles is feasible. There
are many people who believe that in the large-scale architectures, the
distributed object model is inherently unworkable and that we should design all
of our systems with more of an EDI bulk message flavor.
Q: That makes room for conflict.
A: Yes, it is very
disruptive when you have the thought leaders saying we should use this messaging
model, and the people who have the skills in the projects are just sort of
naturally inclined toward the distributed object model. From the management
perspective, it can be quite a difficult challenge to overcome that tension. And
when you see vendors not making clean separations between these two styles of
messaging, so that you have a messaging toolkit from a major application server
or distributed computing infrastructure vendor that allows you to do either one
and doesn't actually make you come out and say which one you are doing, you can
end up with the worst of both worlds.
When you're designing and prototyping/building the initial version of a
system, the impact of these distinctions is unclear; they make the biggest
difference when you're under high load and your scalability requirements start
to become crucial. You don't actually see the impact of a decision you have to
make very early on in the development cycle until very late in the deployment
cycle.
This is the argument that is generally made for using the EDI message-type
architecture over distributed objects -- it's far more scalable. I'm not saying
it actually is, I'm saying this is generally the argument that's made: That it's
asynchronous vs. synchronous, for one, and that you generally have much less
interaction between systems in a messaging architecture. You say 'Here's a big
block of data, go do something with it' as opposed to 'Create a new customer,
give that customer an address, give that customer a name, now start adding line
items to their order' and so on.
The distributed model is generally a lot more chatty. And it's a lot more
convenient because as a programmer you can take smaller steps in figuring out
what the other guy is doing. But then when you start running [this on
large-scale systems] -- I'm not sure we have enough large deployments to say
this has been confirmed -- but the theory is that it will break down under the
high load.
Q: I know something of interest to you is orchestration. What is
it?
A: The problem that orchestration is attempting to solve is
that we can define this nice extensible wire protocol and this very flexible
interface definition framework, but how do I, as a programmer, take advantage of
all of the possible services that are out there? Instead of programming
something that's going to hook it all together, I'm simply going to describe the
relationship among the different services and have a complicated [piece of]
software interpret that description and make everything work. It's similar to a
rules engine in that it's a runtime interpreter. The runtime engine is a piece
of software that sits on a server and interprets that description. That's
actually the piece of software that takes all the appropriate action.
Q: How good have vendors been at adhering to standards in XML?
A: There's good news and bad news here with regard to vendors and
standards. The good news is that almost all of the vendors have been
surprisingly good citizens compared to behavior with regard to previous
standards efforts like CORBA. Even people like Microsoft, who seem to have a
reputation for wanting to define their own standards, have been really good
citizens in working together on some of the basic standards. I think that within
the next year or so you are going to have a lot of highly productive packages of
software and development tools from many vendors that are pretty much
interoperable. Which is a great step forward. And a lot of people have put their
disagreements aside or at least agreed to a fair fight in the standards bodies
and to abide by the decisions of the standards bodies. So that's the good news.
We are in a much better situation than we have been in the past.
Now, the bad news is that this has created a temptation for vendors to create
more standards, whether we necessarily need them or not. And this isn't a
malicious or underhanded thing, it is just that vendors want to naturally
advance the 'state of the art' because innovation is their value-add to the
whole information technology equation. They can hire people, 'innovate' and then
they want to reap some of the economic benefits of that innovation. But for the
people who actually have to deploy these things in enterprises, they would like
each innovation to clear some minimal bar of advancement over the
last-generation of technology. Any new technology is disruptive to development
and deployment; and as the Internet infrastructure of both hardware and software
gets older, making changes to it is more and more likely to cause problems.
Q: What do you see ahead for native XML data stores as opposed to
relying on relational methods?
A: This is yet another wonderful
point of confusion for enterprises to deal with. This was actually one of the
parts of the second edition of my book that ended up being substantially
different. I basically categorize XML data into three categories. The first is
interchange data. You and I want to send data back and forth to each other and I
have this mapping layer that takes various parts of my relational database and
then sends it to you, and your mapping layer maps it into your relational
database. Well, obviously, the whole goal of interchange is to get data from
somebody else's format into a format you already understand. In the case of
interchange data, you are going to store XML in a relational database or a
hierarchical database, whatever your back-end system uses.
The second category of data is content. We should treat a lot of the data as
the content, right? This is information for data sheets and Web sites, and all
of that is going to go into a content management system. That is what content
management systems are for.
Now there is a final category of XML data -- what I would call operational
XML data -- where you are actually using XML data in its native form to drive
the behavior or execution of a system. Orchestration is a wonderful example of
this. If I have a definition in XML of how this thing should behave. I've got to
be able to get to that piece of data very fast. XSLT, to a certain extent, meets
this definition as well. Or if I have a purchase order for an amount, and it is
going to start kicking off authorization procedures and maybe some
manufacturing, I'd better make sure I have that document as-is, so there is no
confusion over what was sent.
So in cases where XML is the operational data, this is where you have a real
choice. In the other cases, the best rule is to never choose anything other than
a well-established infrastructure for doing those things. As far as things go
for storing [XML] operational data, you've actually got a lot of choices. You
could use a native XML store, or an object database with an XML layer on top of
it because they are optimized in similar ways to the native XML stores. Or you
could use a highly optimized subsystem of a relational database for dealing with
precisely this type of data.