12 March 2008 - 1:54Pros and cons of standards

I was reading Bill Burke`s post on transaction compensation via REST and JBPM and I have to tell that I agree with most of his remarks. Bill makes a very interesting point about compensating a transaction: that the compensation itself is an activity of a business process (the activity of handling failure, very likely outside of the system involved) and that this activity could be implemented as a regular activity in a business process using jBPM. It could also be exposed to the outside world thru a REST service.

This is a very interesting take on compensations and his proposition (that compensations are regular business activities that are part of a business process and that could be coded as such) gives a lot of flexibility to handling compensations. However, is exactly this flexibility that will probably force someone away from the compensation scheme devised by Bill and back to WS-BA. As Mark pointed out you still need to enforce end-points to run the same version of the communication protocol, be it WS-BA or an ad-hoc REST-based protocol.
However, I would go further and say that the flexibility devised by Bill runs counter to market acceptance. Standards are straight jackets which people choose to wear when it makes sense, typically when it makes some process (such as interacting with a different system) more efficient. Coding a business activity in WS-BA would enable you to plug it effortlessly different systems implementing the WS-BA standard, in theory at least. You would expose your application to the outside world effortlessly and you could interact with a greater number of systems because you have chosen to trim down your application to fit into the WS-BA straight-jacket.

On the other side, if your application cannot be forced into the WS-BA standard probably it would make sense to drop this standard and expose the compensation logic as you and your partners agree. It would not be the first time that a standard gets ditched for a proprietary solution particular to a few partners and certainly not the last time. Sometimes a straight jacket is just too stifling…