Boulevard of Broken Builds

The last two day I’ve spend following the first world wide SpringSource Core Web Services course. Arjen Poutsma and Joris Kuipers formed a close team delivering more than Spring from the Source . Although up front I was expecting a real hardcore course covering all aspects of webservices and spring-ws in specific. Especially as Arjen was the the primary trainer of the course this would be hard-hard-hard-core. After the first day though, coffering only xml namespace and xpath, soap and wsdl, I wasn’t too optimistic about the core aspect of the course. In particular comparing to the stories I’ve heard about the spring-core training.

The second day however, although only covering extensive spring-ws, ws-security and rest, gave me the feeling that all the core issues had been covered. I could not think about any particular subject which some absolutely needed to know about, to mangle him/her-self into any webservice topic. Which does not mean some topics remain unanswered. Arjen and Joris gave the group a real democratic vote on the topic of the second day, which excluded ws-addressing and a architectural SOA discussion (which might have been the most interesting!). However I might feel about the outcome of the vote, the course itself was of a high level. Especially for a first offering.

Besides the topics mentioned above the topic about ws-versioning remains a hot topic for me. And I definitely won’t spend another opportunity to discuss this topic with Arjen, as I’m very curious about his opinion besides using the transformation filter.

But generally a have a positive feeling about the course. And I would definitely recommend using spring-ws in any project requiring a webservice implementation.