Anyone interest in Web Services with an open mind should read this post by State of Utah's CIO Phil Windley.
His 12-point manifesto should be nailed to the door of every government information office. He asks: "What am I missing?" Nothing, Phil! If just your first two principles were broadly applied, the world would be a much better place. [Jon Udell]
I agree with Jon. I wouldn't limit it to just government agencies though. Any organization that make information available to the public could gain from Phil Windley's manifesto. I appreciate his focus and agree on being practical and providing a solution that doesn't limit Web Services to SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. While Windley's views are quite RESTful in nature, he doesn't get caught up in the blinding zealotry that many leading advocates of REST are noted for.
I also was please to see Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) recognized.
10. Use WSIL to advertise the availability of your service. If it becomes viable in the future we will use UDDI, but having everything documented in WSIL will make that step relatively easy.
Phil's point is spot on. As I've written before, I also believe that the simple decentralized file based nature of WSIL opens the potential for many more interesting and novel applications then UDDI can offer.
Phil appears to raise a question as to the use of WSDL in point 4. If I'm reading his "(?)" correctly, I myself have bene curious about the same thing (particularly with the W3C's release of a public working draft WSDL 1.2 specification), but have not had the bandwidth to look into. Is it possble to represent a non-SOAP Web Service function in WSDL and would it be possible to dynamically bind to that service if useful?
