Pig Pile

Bill de hÓra writes (but I transposed it into a question)...

...where could [you] point to a solution and say WS-* was critical to success[?]

And then more...

As for XSD it just does not seem to be helpful. I think that has to do with not only XSD being complicated (due to a requirements creep toward genericity that resulted in something of a monster spec). It's also quite low-level, and in practical terms tends to expose a platform's type system, which is invariably implementation specific. Which is to say there's an encapsulation problem when using XSD - too much how, not enough what. It would be cleaner to expose domain level structures like "Customer" that obey a RELAX or RDF schema...

There is one nice feature about the REST or XML-over-HTTP approach - you can definitely scale down. Scaling down is important because if you can't scale down you presumably have to start big, which is risky for any project, unless you believe big working systems derive form big working systems...

XMPP rocks. Publicly the fuss around XMPP will be in the commercial sector - about Google Talk and Voice Over IM. I think it could quietly become the "other" protocol for the get-it-done school of systems integrations, mainly in situations where push or timeliness is a serious need, and people are talking crazy talk, like long haul JMS integrations.