Re: [jbossws-dev] Re: Web Service Stack for EAP 5

I'll have to say that that I don't fully agree with "good enough". :-)

However, it is very hard for me to specifically state that a particular feature/item "must" be addressed in a particular time frame. Here is why: - We don't have a formal way of surveying our userbase to see what would really be interesting & compelling for them. We have to gave into the proverbial crystal ball and try to back up our prognostications with anecdotal evidence from personal visits with customers, forum postings and support cases (so I added Darran on the CC, do double check my list of priorities below). Certainly the jira voting system has failed us in this area. So we lack real compelling and actionable data so we base things on intuition. - Many of the people who do ask for a specific WS-* fall in the "tirekicker" category. That is a US expression for someone who is basically a professional shopper, not a buyer (aka adopter/user), they love to look but they have no motivation to make a decision. Corporate America's IT shops are full of these kinds of people. There are people who have full-time jobs in product review, standards setting and general vendor abuse. :-) These folks are normally measuring the "value" for technology based on its buzzword compliance level, much like a Gartner or Forrester would as well. I'm not saying they are bad people but their job is to put often to keep particular technologies out of their data centers, they love to say "IBM is our standard, JBoss isn't on the list, unless you can prove X, Y & Z to me". These folks are non-coders and won't even be involved in the real deliverables. - Some "prospects" represent ISVs who often love the "best of breed" approach. They will self- assemble their own "platform" from various OSS projects. Obviously, this is not a "sweet spot" for us since we want people to use specific components in a specific platform so we can properly support & patch their platform. So I try to remove these recollections from how I prioritize things in my own head. - I have the perception that the "big vendors" have dedicated teams of "standards" folks who are pushing BS in the various committees to simply stay ahead of the open source commoditization of their techs. Let's face it. The big boys have lost billions to open source (JBoss, Tomcat, Hibernate and others), I'm fairly certain that they see "standards" as a competitive weapon and their sales staffs have been instructed to educate the userbase on this fact that open source can't keep up in standards & tools.

With all of that said, WS-RM & WS-Notification are asked for the most (beyond SOAP, WSDL, JAX-WS, what I call the basics). There is a belief in our userbase that they do wish to take advantage of these features even if they don't yet know how.

I don't recall running into a single JBoss shop (outside of ISVs) who specifically moved to CXF or Metro to get this feature. However, I have run into several who continue to use Axis on JBoss for various reasons (mostly around legacy MSFT interop or simple comfort factor). Honestly the most actionable priorities that I feel "strongly" about are (granted, not are all on this particular team), listed in perceived priority order: - Dramatically better integration into the ESB - JBDS Tooling needs to have support for JBossWS, not just Axis, customers are confused by this - JON needs to have support for JBossWS: take what is at http://localhost:8080/jbossws and make sure it is available in JON, perhaps it is there but I've never seen it. - More proof of interop with .NET. At this point, I just tell people that if they find it is broken, get a support subscription and enter it as a high priority bug, we will fix it.

I remember Kevin W from MSFT worked his butt off at JBossWorld Vegas to get helloworld version of WS-Security & MTOM working with a .NET client to JBoss backend. It wasn't well documented, no examples, lots of pain on his part and he would be considered a very, very advanced developer, well beyond the skills of your typical enterprise IT developer (our typical customerbase)

- Security: there is a lot related to security that I've not had a chance to think through. It relates to JAAS, SAML, integration with Red Hat's "certificate server". This actually comes up often and I dance enough to skip the answers. :-) However, there is enough questioning in this area to suggest the userbase wants some nice examples/docs and education on the "best practices". Clearly I have no clue how to implement all of this but I've not dug through the docs, wikis & forums enough to see if someone has described how to tackle all of my security (encryption, authentication, authorization) needs. I've never seen this in JON and that is where it eventually needs to get to as security is not managed by the developers but by the administrators. - REST - SOA Software & Amberpoint supported So, I ask all of you this. Do the bullets above also sound like priorities in your own minds, therefore, we/the team, need to spend a few more cycles really nailing down these requirements, designs and roadmap which release/timeframe they'll be "proven" in? Is there anything that I left off that you happen to know is also a critical priority (that isn't just a bug fix).

Mark Little wrote: > Understood and I think what you've got at the moment is really good > enough. It's the core capabilities. Let's just make sure it's > interoperable and fast, and job done :-) > > Mark. > > > On 19 Mar 2008, at 13:11, Heiko Braun wrote: > >> >> Agreed. I am just saying instead looking at what the others >> have on their managers checklist, we should first come up with >> actual requirements. >> >> If we are talking about EAP 5, just write down what the stack really >> needs to provide and the WS team can decide on the best way to >> achieve >> this. That's at least my opinion. >> >> >> /Heiko >> >> On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 12:57 +0000, Mark Little wrote: >>> But it's not the way to go in the future. >> > > ---- > Mark Little > mlittle(a)redhat.com > > JBoss, a Division of Red Hat > Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod > Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SI4 1TE, United Kingdom. > Registered in UK and Wales under Company Registration No. 3798903 > Directors: Michael Cunningham (USA), Charlie Peters (USA), Matt > Parsons (USA) and Brendan Lane (Ireland). >