Guy Wiener

Ogres are like onions. They have layers. Web services are also like onions. They too have layers. Inside the server there are services. Inside the services there are ports. Inside the ports there are operations. The operations receive messages. Inside the messages there are parts. Inside the parts there are documents. Inside the documents there are – finally! – Small bits of data. If there was a competition for “How many layers of fluff you can put around an int and still pretend that it makes sense”, Web services protocols would have won, by a long shot. If you send a single 32-bit number to a web service and delete a single character from the XML message that carries it, there’s a 100-to-1 chance that you won’t delete actual data.

Now that’s not really ranting. Like the papers in a carton box, all that wrapping is there for a good reason. It provides validation, security, reliability and other good-to-have feature. You’re not supposed to send a single int in a SOA platform. You’re suppose to send critical business data to your legacy mainframe application, and be glad that all that envelope protects it.

Nevertheless, I still remember that lab exercise in operating systems, back in the old CS building in the Technion. The assignment was to send an array of bytes over a socket. We had to write it in good-old-C and it looked something like

write(socket, sizeof(int), buffer);

I won’t say I miss those days, but things definitely changed since them. Btw, that int miraculously made it through.