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Could application servers be overkill?

David Berlind ZDNet US

Published: 02 Apr 2003 15:09 BST

If you believe Cape Clear Software chairman and chief executive Annrai O'Toole, the major Web services vendors peddling their respective application servers -- IBM (WebSphere), BEA (WebLogic), Oracle (9iAS), and Microsoft (.Net). -- are trying to sell you a red herring.

"The truth," said O'Toole, "is that if you want to take some new or legacy code and turn it into an XML-based service that talks to another XML-based service [aka: a services oriented architecture or SOA], then you don't need a full-blown application server like all these vendors are saying you need."

That's right. O'Toole thinks we're heading back down the path of complexity that Web services, and the application servers that supposedly power them, were supposed to eliminate in the first place. The result, according to O'Toole, is an absurd amount of aggravation and expense that could be easily avoided if only IT managers and developers decide to make the document, rather than the application server, the centre of their attention.

O'Toole doesn't necessarily mean "document" in the literal sense. An advocate of Web services and services oriented architectures, O'Toole said that putting an XML interface on any digital entity -- be it a document, a Java component with business logic, some data, or even a mainframe terminal session -- basically gives that entity a document metaphor.

"The document metaphor is very exciting," said O'Toole. "It will have a profound effect on the way people think about documents and collaboration." The problem, according to the chief executive of the Ireland-based software company, is that the application server providers are trying to convince everyone that a service oriented architecture isn't complete until it can handle the sort of complex messaging and choreography tasks that are characteristic of the older, monolithic transaction-oriented, database-driven systems. If we buy into all that complexity to make an SOA work, O'Toole says, the cost of Web services implementation will be disproportionate to 99 percent of the collaborations waiting to be "developed".

To some extent, the document-centricity of which O'Toole speaks sounds much like Microsoft's pitch for XDocs. The difference, however, is that the document mentality applies to everything -- not merely to Microsoft Office. But converting static digital entities into services that can talk to each other still requires wrapping those entities in a service layer that can send, receive, and advertise itself on a network. Enter Cape Clear.