I may have read too much into James' criticism yesterday... he clarified his point that WSDLs in the ECM space are awkward, which I agree with.

I feel this is probably because most Enterprise Content Management vendors are still pretty green when it comes to the value of web services, and service-oriented architectures (SOA). Stellent was using SOAs nine years ago, before there was even a name for it. It helped us solve specific problems, and add features rather quickly. Adding an XML/SOAP interface was a natural extension to the existing "content services"... so, provided Oracle learns through osmosis, its safe to say Oracle "gets it" when it comes to SOA and ECM.

I'm confused when he claims I'm pro-ReST, because I'm quite clearly a critic of ReST for enterprise systems... although I like its simplicity. And Stellent/Oracle ECM services are both clearly coarse-grained and stateless. I cover that in chapter 2 of my book on Stellent, which I would encourage he read before judging. And, as I said earlier, custom security integrations are fairly simple... so "deferring authorization" is possible in a number of ways.

Here's a quick sample of what Stellent web services looked like nine years ago:

http://www.stellent.com/en/index.htm?IsJava=1

And here's what they look like via SOAP:

http://www.stellent.com/en/index.htm?IsSoap=1

And that's just one of the ways to get SOAP output... Note: it ain't perfect, and never will be. I'd like Oracle to make a handful of changes so its easier for the consumer to know what to do with the response... but that limitation is mainly due to the fact that Stellent was several orders of magnitude smaller than the competition, and thus comprehensive developer documentation was a lower priority...

However, its a genuine web service, and not a lame wrapper around an existing fine-grained API... which I believe is what James was complaining about.