Such an argument could be made for the proliferation of WS-standards that has helped web services technology mature into precisely the same kind of bifurcation that has afflicted Java. There are the building blocks that everybody supports, and then there is WS-everything else. No wonder there is a WS-I in place to define interoperability tests for the building blocks that are supposedly not in question.

So in spite of the noise, and the fact that of course, there will be separate but equal camps for things like federated identity, a consensus has emerged that web services are the protocols where vendors will theoretically pay more than lip service to interoperability. If you had any doubts, just look at what the BPM community is up to.

Traditionally BPM vendors competed on their ability to abstract higher level business processes from the programmatic logic that comprised software applications. Much of the value-add was in the modeling language and environment, which was typically proprietary. Excluding XPDL, which originated from the document workflow world, there was nothing in the way of standards until the BPMN modeling notation materialized several years ago (more about that in a moment).

When it came to execution, processes modeled through BPM were typically exposed through generation of C++, and later, Java or .NET code, and integrated through use of adapters. With emergence of web services, BPM vendors began using the basic WS- standards, both for exposing their own processes and for replacing proprietary integration adapters. In some ways, this reminds us of classic 4GLs, where the programming language and visual design environment was proprietary, but execution leveraged various de facto standards (typically dialects of SQL, or more generic ODBC/JDBC).

As we noted several weeks back, there’s a growing tendency for BPM vendors to ace out the code generation piece entirely. The obvious benefit is that you streamline the process by eliminating a step. In this case, you dispense with the need to continually sync code with the process model, which is one way to avoid bugs, discrepancies, or in extreme cases, potential compliance issues. You may also change the roles that software developers play, but even if you dispense with code generation, there’s still software involved, and with it, software developers.