Treffer: Vice President, Technology Transfer Object Management Group

Since the bloom of networked computing during the last half of the 1990s, the IT industry has seen a parade of new middleware platforms come and stay. (Support costs would be lower if they would come and go, but this never happens.) In spite of advocates ’ claims that each one was so superior to its predecessors that it would take over the entire middleware space, each has only been able to establish itself in the restricted segment where it offered an advantage. As a result, today’s enterprise IT department may have to support applications using CORBA (still the only vendor- and operating-system independent, standardized middleware), COM/DCOM/ActiveX, Java/RMI, EJB, XML/SOAP, and other middleware platforms. To these, we are now adding C#/.Net and the main topic of this article, Web Services (WS). (By the way, we don’t believe that C#/.Net and Web Services will be the last platforms that your IT department will have to accommodate, but that is a topic for another article.) To the enterprise supporting this complex infrastructure, there is pain at two levels: First, building distributed applications is hard. Any of these middleware platforms is, by itself, complex enough that programmers skilled in its practice are a scarce and valued resource