Network World recently published a “technology update” column I wrote for them on WS-ResouceTransfer. It was supposed to come out soon after the release of WS-ResourceTransfer (in August 2006) but got postponed a few times. In the process, the editors requested that I made some improvements but also made some changes to the article that I hadn’t seen until it was published. The title is from them for example, as is this statement which I don’t actually agree with: “Models can be easily translated from one modeling language to another, so the invoker of the model and the service providers don’t need to use the same modeling language. Service Modeling Language, for example, was designed for that purpose.” SML was not designed for the purpose of doing model translation (even though you can of course transform to and from SML) and unfortunately model translation is not always easy. I guess the lesson is that if I had written the article more clearly to start with they wouldn’t have felt the need to make such modifications.
I think the article is still helpful in describing the potential role of WS-ResourceTransfer at the intersection of SOA and model-based management.