Jon Udell tries to hook up Outlook calendars and Google calendars - and demonstrates the issues that non-propeller heads are going to run into. The interesting thing is, the issues aren't really due to MS or Google actively playing walled garden games; both support iCal, for instance. It's just that neither one really concentrates on interop, so the steps just aren't that easy. The post may end up being highly valuable for me - I don't use Outlook, but "everyone" else at Cincom does.

Patrick Logan points to a debate over CORBA and WS* between Roger Sessions and Terry Coatta over at ACM Queue. He points out some fun stuff, like this exchange here:

RS If you’re using the J2EE standards such as RMI (remote method invocation) over IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol), you are primarily going to be doing that within a single vendor’s system, such as a WebSphere system. If you’re going from a WebSphere system to a WebLogic system, your best shot at interoperability is through Web services. Why? Because you’re crossing a technology boundary.

TC You’re claiming that RMI over IIOP doesn’t actually work?

RS It doesn’t work for interoperability across technology boundaries.

TC

There seem to be people out there getting it to work. Certainly, back in the days when I worked with CORBA there was no problem having different vendors’ ORBs (object request brokers) interoperate with one another. We used three or four of them at Open Text and had no difficulty at all with those environments interoperating with one another.

RS As long as you’re going CORBA to CORBA, it works fine. But not when you are trying to get a CORBA system to work with a non-CORBA system.

TC But going from WebSphere to one of the other EJB vendors (e.g., WebLogic) in the CORBA space, there were probably five or six different major ORB vendors floating around, not to mention a couple of open source efforts, and all of those interoperated really well with one another.

RS CORBA to CORBA. They’re all running on the same basic core of CORBA technology. The difference between that and Web services is that for Web services, unlike CORBA, there is no assumption whatsoever about what the underlying technology is.

Yes, one CORBA end point only works with another CORBA end point. Does that mean that Sessions believes that WS* works differently? Can I send a plain text (as opposed to XML) document via FTP to a WS* server listening via HTTP? What point is Sessions trying to make here? WS* is no more or less interoperable than CORBA was. The difference? The fact that most web services run via HTTP (and thus, via port 80) - so they can move between firewalls. With CORBA, you have to get IT (or IT security) to open up a port in the firewall (on both ends). The usage of HTTP as a transport gets around that problem.

That's really the only difference between the two at the 50,000 foot level. Lower down, of course, WS* manages to be even more complex (as Patrick points out). Managing to be more complex than CORBA is a rare achievement.

It's interesting to me how SOAP has so much hype, and (apparently) so little actual usage. The blogging world has adopted XML-RPC and simple post mechanisms; Amazon sports two API's - SOAP and a simple url based system. The latter is much more heavily used. This seems to mirror what happened with CORBA - a lot of hype, a few vendors got heavily into it, and a few IT shops made heavy use of it. The rest yawned. Manageability explains it like this:

I also think that standards groups tend to choose the lowest common denominator of innovation. That is, standards groups tend to only approve innovation that they all collectively grasp, however in most cases innovation tends to be grasped only by a few.

Another problem with standards groups tend to create documentation rather than implementation. That is a fatal flaw which I explored in "Be Liberal in What You Accept, Conservative in What You Send". The lack of a standard compliance implementation undermines interoperability, the core essence of standardization.

It's interesting that standards groups give the participants an illusion of choice. Unfortunately, history clearly shows their fate is preordained.