“Standards bodies fulfil a very important role in the industry
but the slow speed at which they grind along can sometimes be a bit
tedious. A few weeks ago, IBM, Microsoft and a number of others
submitted the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) specification to
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for consideration as a
standard. The purpose of SOAP is to allow Microsoft COM+ components
(e.g. written in Visual Basic or C++) to communicate with
components that use the competing CORBA standard (commonly written
as Enterprise Java Beans, EJBs).”
“Whilst the W3C is mulling over the pros and cons of SOAP as
part of its due diligence process, IBM has gone ahead and
implemented it in its new SOAP for Java software – claimed to be
the first real life incarnation of the specification. In an
extremely cheeky move, IBM has now gone on to donate this software
to Apache, the non-profit making organisation famous for its
ubiquitous open source Web server.”
“The fly in the ointment with this bypassing of standards
bodies is when powerful vendors abuse their market position and
force “standards” onto the world unilaterally. After all, SOAP
would not be necessary if Microsoft had fallen in with everyone
else behind CORBA rather than persisting with its proprietary
alternative.”