BPEL / open standard support

Monday, February 12, 2007

Looks like it's standardization week for me this week...
Today I had a discussion with an architect (I don't say with another architect, as more and more I feel alienated from this group of professionals, even though a large part of my consulting work concerns architecture) on the support of BPEL from IBM WebSphere and Tibco BusinessWorks. His opinion is that IBM provides better support for the "open standard" BPEL than Tibco.

I objected for 3 reasons: first of all, Tibco BusinessWorks is the first ESB that supports the BPEL 2.0 standard. Not IBM WebSphere, not Oracle's ESB, but Tibco BusinessWorks.
Second of all, some might argue that Tibco did not provide support for BPEL 1.1, while IBM did. True. However, in case that's the claim, one may have forgotten that BPEL 1.1 has never been ratified by OASIS (yeah, I know some stuff on standards ;-) ). So basically, we are not dealing with an open standard when dealing with BPEL 1.1.
Third and most importantly in my opinion, I think you cannot provide "better" support for a particular open standard. You either fully support the specifications of the open standard, or you don't. There is nothing in between....

The proof of the pudding is in the eating: the most commonly used open standard is still HTML (in whichever official version). Try the following: create a perfectly, well-formed HTML document, and pull it through the validator from W3C. Woohoo, "valid HTML 4.0" (or whatever version you threw in at the meta tag). Now, add one single teeny-weeny bit in your HTML that is not standard compliant, and validate again. Result: "This page is not valid HTML 4.0" (yeah, NOT in bold). Simple as that.

Open standards compliance is like a boolean: it is true or false (or "not set", if you are very precise). I rest my case.

Categories: standards, W3C, BPEL, Tibco, IBM, open-standards, OASIS