TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

Darwinism and Standards

In an interview with Computergram, which is bound to get lots of press coverage and comment in the next few days, Cape Clear's CEO Annrai O'Toole makes the following interesting comments:

Web Services Standards Armies Should Fight to the Death

The standards war that is being played out in the crucial area of web services choreography between the rival Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) camps should be fought until only one is left standing, according to the CEO of web services integration vendor Cape Clear Software Inc, Annrai O'Toole.

O'Toole, who was co-founder and CTO of Iona before he started Cape Clear, said in an interview with ComputerWire: "It is the simplest thing in the world to get a compromise in the area of standards. But you end up with a junk spec. The worst outcome is some silly compromise - just stapling them together. We need one or the other, not both."

[Computergram]

While I think the ease of achieving a compromise is slightly (!) overstated, it is certainly the case that it's a Highlander end game here - "There can be only one" [standard] That's what customers and users actually want, and whether that is achieved by compromise or extinction is largely up to the players involved.

Ultimately, you can't fight market forces - if a specification is achieving traction over another, then it *is* the de-facto "official" standard bearer. That's exactly what happened with SOAP over ebXML, for example. That's also what is happening with BPEL too.