anxious for vendors such as SeeBeyond, which was recently bought by Sun Microsystems, and webMethods to embrace JBI. “When you can see how it all fits together in the big picture of JBI, a very nice infrastructure emerges,” he says.

Of course, toolkits and frameworks are double-edged swords. Even when wire protocols are standard and open, you can get locked in to proprietary abstractions layered on top of those protocols. That’s why pragmatic architects and developers who don’t yet need advanced WS-* features tend to focus on the basics: SOAP and WSDL. “If you need some kind of envelope, why wouldn’t you use SOAP?” Subramaniam asks. “And if you need to describe your interfaces precisely, why wouldn’t you use WSDL?” Frank Grossman, co-founder of Mindreef, says that most of the customers who use his company’s SOAPscope diagnostic suite have adopted this strategy, which he adroitly labels “WS-JustRight.”

For Grossman and others, WS-JustRight means using SOAP and WSDL to strike a balance between formal contracts and agile interoperability, while laying a foundation for future use of more advanced SOA features. PGP’s Brodbeck agrees that WSDL is the key enabler of reusable business transactions and processes. He also extends the definition of WS-JustRight, however, to include enterprise-enabled RSS as the key enabler of reusable content.

For many practitioners, WS-Just Right now includes aspects of WS-Security, too. For a few, it includes reliable messaging, transactions, routing, and policies related to these features. The definition will evolve over time, but the only one that really matters now is the one that’s just right for you.

— Jon Udell

 

Survey says …

We asked Info World readers to tell us what factors drove their IT decisions. Here’s what they told us.

Which SOA benefit do you perceive as being the most beneficial to your company?

• A development architecture that is responsive to quickly changing business requirements 35%

• Leveraging existing data and development for future applications 35%

• Saving money in the long-term by re-using services 13%

• Adopting a long-term strategy and preventing short-term churn in technologies and people 18%