I’ve been in Boston for a couple of days to attend the WSEC workshop.  I’ll avoid some of the interesting (but still inconclusive) discussion about the ultimate relationship of REST and WS-*.  But two of the emerging conclusions of the workshop are interesting.

First, my proposal for a WS-Core WG to continue the active maintenance of the raft of specs being completed in the W3C, and continuing to keep the pressure up on interoperability testing, was well received, and ended up being a primary area of agreement for the Working Group participants.  I don’t think that’s because it is a brilliant idea, rather because it’s fairly obvious, modest, and concrete.

Secondly, one of the major pain points in WS-* remains the poor support of XML Schema that is being addressed in the understaffed XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group. A renewed effort to address this customer pain point is essential.  I’m confident WSO2 can continue to participate and maybe even step up our work in this critical area, and I hope other vendors who wrongly dismissed the effort as irrelevant after Microsoft didn’t show up will reevaluate their positions.

The consequences of not doing so are to weaken confidence in the description side of WS-* that remains in my mind one of the primary advantages of WS-* over REST.  If we can’t do a better job, I think REST and REST description languages such as WADL will gain momentum.  That’s not a bad thing in itself, but some healthy competition will keep the architectures competing on their merits rather than their execution.

Thanks to all the participants for some engaging and informative discussion.

Brother Jason’s new company Acesis decloaks their pilot program in Electronic Health Record startup.  Attacking the problem at it’s source - making the process of data capture better than paper, rather than pumping up the long-term benefits of electronic data, which are already well known but haven’t had any appreciable impact on physician behavior.

First public reactions are quite positive.  Look at other news reports too.

Wish them rapid success!