Tech Life of Recht

At Trifork, we have had a number of different consulting jobs in the Danish public sector, especially for the National IT and Telecom Agency (who is also sponsoring development of OpenUDDI). Among other things, we’ve been deeply involved in OIOWSDL, a WSDL profile for the Danish government. This profile specifies how to use WSDL and XML Schemas to do contract-first development. All in all quite reasonable – you can always argue whether the correct choices have been made, but at least you don’t have to make them yourself.
I had the somewhat doubtful honor of ensuring that OIOWSDL is compatible with all the popular platforms out there – which means that I’ve tested OIOWSDL-conforming WSDL and XSD with IBM RAD, BEA WebLogic, .NET 2 and 3, Ruby, Axis 1 and 2, and others. I already knew that web services were complicated, but that exercise really made the complexity clear. As an added bonus, I’ve been haunted by web services ever since because I’m now the guy who knows everything about them. This is also why the term WS-Deathstar is not accurate – it should be WS-Blackhole, because once you’ve come too close, you’ll never get away.

So, it was quite a change when we were asked to help with a REST profile (OIOREST). For me, it made perfect sense – REST provides much easier access to data, and interoperability is also much easier to accomplish. Unfortunately, it’s only in Danish, but we’ve taken the first steps and written a draft of the profile. The draft can be downloaded at oiorest.dk where you can also find an invitation to a workshop. The workshop is open for everybody who is interested, and the purpose is to extract experiences and attitudes towards REST.
oiorest.dk also sports two examples of what types of REST services we see. Feel free to play with them, but don’t use them for production.

It will be interesting to see where OIOREST will go from here. My hope is that more data will become public accessible – for example the Central Business Register, polution information, and all the other stuff that’s hidden away right now.