One of the promises of Web services was that developers would be able to build loosely coupled applications. Toufic Boubez thinks that promise has been broken.
Addressing a packed room at the Web Services Edge 2005 show, Boubez, chief technology officer of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Layer 7 Technologies Inc. and co-author of the universal description, discovery and integration specification, expressed his frustration with the limitations of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
"WSDL is really just an API [application programming interface]," Boubez said. "It's totally inadequate to address many of the policy rules such as who can access a Web service. In order to describe Web services, you need more than just an API. Why would I want to expose my back-end systems to the Web when there are issues such as security, privacy and reliability?"
The fact that SOAP messages contain transport URLs, user information in the header and need to know how to interact with the WSDL API creates three levels of tight coupling, according to Boubez.
