JoeLong’s talk on the plan for migrating existing applications to Indigowas, for me, the most interesting talk of the day. I was especially interestedin how he contextualized today’s implementation of WSE with respect tothe eventual Indigo-oriented future.
I had previously seen WSE as sort of this pre-Indigo technology, and thoughtthat Indigo would be positioned as WSE on steroids. To a degree, this is true,but I’ve learned that Indigo is in actuality much more than that. Themost important takeaway from Joe’s talk was the following: whileit’s true that migrating the final version of WSE to Indigo will notrequire code changes, migrating from version to version of WSE may require anon-trivial amount of development effort.
What this means is that if you’re currently developing applicationsthat are leveraging WSE today and also have a reasonable expectation oflongevity, you need to budget time to evolve your WSE code because futureversions of WSE may not be backward-compatible.
WSE is a “preview” technology. It’s around to allow thosecustomers who have an immediate need for the features that WSE provides today,and is intended to provide a competitive edge for early adopters. Inherent inthis is the idea because of WSE’s status as a preview technology, it willchange over time. Furthermore, those changes may break code that you’vealready written, and if you want to retain that competitive edge you will needto build time in the project schedule to upgrade to future versions of WSE asthey become available.
Eventually, between now and the time that Indigo ships, WSE will stabilize andgrow into the feature set that will be what we now know as Indigo. If you takethe time to stay current with WSE as it evolves, your eventual transition toIndigo will be simple. However, the amount of effort required to keep up withWSE as it evolves may be non-trivial. It would be great if we could quantifythis in some way, but that’s almost impossible. WSE is a toolset forthose who require the competitive advantage (and are willing to assume therisks) that come with life on the bleeding edge of web services technology.
