Web Services no magic bullet for .NET / Java Interop

On the Microsoft side of the equation, most developers and architects are aware that you can "Web Service-ize" almost everything possibly with the exclusion of passing DataSets. I always assumed that simple types are best, and collections of those simple types should be fine. Composing those simple types and collections into structures, and structures of structures seemed to be the way to go.

So imagine my surprise when we "Web Service-ized" a bunch of Java components that exposed just that kind of interface, and it didn't work. After mucking around for almost the whole day, we started returning to basic principles. We started throwing out parameter after parameter, structure after structure, until we were left with something that should have just worked:

string SomeFunction(char c);

But it didn't.

This was ridiculous. If Web Services couldn't give me interoperability at this most basic level, I swore that the whole thing must have been a conspiracy. After some ill-mannered googling, I found out that:

The Java char datatype is not supported because of an omission in XML Schema.

Bugger that.

They're all out working on WS-Make the coffee machine interoperate with Columbian coffe bean growers, and they couldn't be thorough enough to handle that?

The thing is, for this project nobody budgeted or scheduled time to go over all those APIs to find out what wouldn't work, change the component's interface and implementation, re-test it, and on and on... We were strapped as it was.

The thing was, I hadn't given this interoperability thing a thought. "Just use Web Services", is what I, and everybody thought. With all the wizards and stuff built in to the tooling, you can get a component "Web Service-ized" in next to no time.

I'm beginning to wonder what else haven't they been telling us...

Posted by Udi Dahan at 06:48 AM  Permalink