It's been a few weeks since I've blogged. I've just been too busy, heads down with day job work which I can't talk about just yet, but I thought I'd just get back into the blogging rhythm here a few of the things from the past few weeks; to catch up on the news.

In any order.

There was the recent announcement of WS-Addressing work group set up in W3C and the WS-Management 'coming out' the other day regarding a joint Microsoft - AMD - DELL - Intel - SUN submission of WS-Management to the DMTF folks.

I first got a glimpse at WS-Management about a month ago and I'd expected the spec to already be out, but better a little late than never. WS-Management is a nice spec to setup instrumentation monitoring, which is going to become very important around observing the operational behavior of running services. Don't underestimate how it's going to fit into a bigger picture.

It's nice to see SUN Corporate take on more of the web service standards with us. That might not make much paparazzi press but the customers will benefit at the end of the day, and it's clear now that at the very top Executive level that SUN is going with web services; and clearly moved the corporation past their earlier efforts like ebXML.

Speaking of web service standards, it should be obvious by now that what's happening around standardizing the many web service specs is that the web service concept covers a broad range of technical infrastructure. You have to grok that scope issue first before moving to the next step of understanding where the standards are going. There's been some traffic in the press / blogs by some 'XML names' about 'WS-complexity', and that the world doesn't need all the web service specs. Well if all you want to do is move a file, like a biz document from point A to B, and you don't care about a bunch of other things then there is ftp today; go for it! It all depends on how far you want to go, and that context gives these new specs their inherent technical value.

So, since web service specs are reaching out to address a broad scope and as it's a fact that no one standards organization can realistically claim to have all the working domain expertise over such a broad range of technology - what is really going on with the standards process is an effort to gather together the leading industry domain experts and openly collaborate on making the new web service specs as real world as possible. The litmus test on the specs is by taking them thru the workshop process (which I blogged on earlier). The basic idea on standardizing the web service specs is to end up with a real world working spec which already has major industry buy in.

The next step in standardizing the work is taking the 'post workshop process' specs from the industry experts into those open standards bodies which today closest align the industry practice in that particular domain of activities. Oh yes, to create open and royalty free web service standards.

I've heard some people make side comments that this particular standards development process breaks the normal 'committee driven' 'life unto its own' 'politically charged' conventional standards process. Well ... YES I hope so. We all know making standards is not a quick process and it also doesn't have the greatest track record; sometimes.

Going into the traditional standards committee process you probably can't really say what the committee will really produce as a final standard (and you are not always sure you have all the relevant domain experts - but you've probably got some great 'professional standards technocrats'). I mean, there's so many easy political ways to steer or stall a standards committee, irrespective of what the people who actually do the standards work want; like only show up with a gang of 'friends' for a vote to block any new work - then the 'gang' leaves after the vote or doesn't do any work.

Coming out of the traditional standards committee political process, in practice you still have to go at least another round with starting up the 'industry interop workshops' and 'vendor plugfests' only to discover probably that the original spec has 'a few technical holes' - so wait for version 3! (or worse - the spec is out of sync with leading industry thinking and developments)

Time will tell how well the new standards process proves itself with customers, but I'm an optimist; and when you've got that much industry push behind it and all those thousands of people working towards a common vision - something good is bound to come out (sooner or later).

Elsewhere in the past few weeks, it seems there's been a lot more 'press' about our competitors than us; which is nice - thank you very much :-)