Lazycoder

WS and immutable contracts

dasBlonde – Don Box and Doug Purdy philosophize on the meaning of SOA and .NET

The one point I haven’t seen addressed in any WS discussion is this: What happens to the contract if the company providing the contract goes out of business?

If you base your application on several vendor provided components, you at least get to keep those components around after the company that provided them is long gone. What about services? If you base your applications login functionality on Company X’s authentication service, you either have to re-write your login functionality or shop for a new authentication service if Company X goes under.

Thinking about stuff like that is what makes me get all itchy when I think about the “one big program being written” talk and the future of Web Services and SO.