Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Aren't web services meant to solve interoperability problems?

Somebody has written a web service using JBoss. I'm trying to call it from .NET 1.1 or, heaven forbid, the MS SOAP toolkit. And neither of them can call any operations that have parameters, which kind of restricts what we can do with it. I guess one solution might be to have methods called method1(), method2(), method3() etc all the way up to MAXINT. Doesn't seem a great idea. Or perhaps an ASP.NET 2 web service could call the JBoss web service and expose the functionality as another web service? Yeh it's daft, but it might just work.

So could it be the folks telling us web services were the panacea for all our interoperability problems were actually just snake oil salesmen? Surely not...

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