Comic dialog
All SOAPed up and ready to go.
Caption: A web service relationship, in terms of dating.
Panel 1
Provider: Well hello there.
Requester: Hi, nice to meet you. I can tell this is going to be the start of something beautiful.
Provider: Oooh yeah!
Caption: The introduction
Panel 2
Provider: Oh the things I can do. You'll be SO amazed.
Requester: Well, I don't need much, but I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do.
Caption: The date
Panel 3
Requester: OW! Not there!
Provider: Oh God! I'm so sorry, it looked like it fit there.
Requester: Why won't you just tell me what you want?
Provider: Ahh! Why didn't you accept the stream?! It's going everywhere. There's just so much of it!
Caption: The nightcap
Panel 4
Provider: Don't.. Don't even look at me.
Requester: So, that's all you can do? I thought you said you were good.
Caption: The day after.
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Gary
Author Comments aka Comic News
Web service rant
No matter how well planned a web service integration is, I've never seen it go off without a hitch. Eventually they end up working, but there's a lot of back and forth, which most people don't expect when they go into it, and once it's setup both sides often want to forget it's there, like it was just some tawdry one night stand that neither wants to remember. Now ask me how I really feel about web services. Heh. This rant brought to you by many hours of web service work lately. Unfortunately, it's not limited to a single client, and it's not the client's fault. A web service really is a lot of talking. Both sides have to come to an agreement to not just the structure of the messaging, but also the flow of the messaging and format/structure of the data (not really defined in a dtd, only kind of defined there). An example is "United States" vs "United States of America" vs "UNITED STATES" vs "USA" vs "US" etc. Some of that can be defined in a dtd, but most of it can't, and people often don't realize that the data in a different system is different than the data they have, and those differences can have various results in different systems, depending on how data centric the systems are and how much leniency they all. Ok, that ends my little rant... for now.
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