Saturday, December 13, 2003

Cape Clear Takes On "Extra Baggage"

Annrai O'Toole, CEO of Cape Clear had commented, "O'Toole claimed that complicated protocols like the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS) or the Web services Choreography Interface (WSCI) are extra baggage and that any functionality that those specifications are designed to handle is easily covered by something found in virtually every system: JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript)."

Since then... he apparently has changed his mind, referencing the Cape Clear suite... "The product also supports Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for sequential workflows and composite Web services. Through this support, users can chain sets of Web services to deliver a single, composite service, Cape Clear said. "

Well, good!

The recent article went on to say, "The Cape Clear Data Interchange is a lightweight alternative to EDI and ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) and allows such documents as spreadsheets, order forms and expense reports to be exchanged between applications regardless of format."

The requirements of *real* ETL software are significantly different than those of a messaging system with transformations. In the few instances where I've seen vendors attempt to build both features into a single product they usually end up with half-baked attempts at both. My guess is that Cape Clear did something more like an ESB but is casting a broader net to see what fish they catch... more investigation is necessary.

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