BEA, IBM spar on Web services development. Companies exchange platform insults [InfoWorld: Top News] [via Sam Gentile]

“BEA in a statement said it found that the development of a Web service to accept and confirm an employee ID number took developers only five steps with Workshop as opposed to 28 steps in IBM’s platform to partially replicate the same Web service.”

Hmm…does it really matter if it takes 5 clicks or 28 clicks to generate my web service?  Maybe the first time I do it, I might care…but once I’m familiar with the tools, and I know what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter too much.  And I’m not going to be able to deploy that 5-click web service anyway – there’s a lot more involved in deploying a web service than running through a wizard.

As an aside, I’ve used IBM’s tools (WSAD) for quick-starting web services briefly, and I gotta tell you, it was certainly not as, uh, intuitive as I might have hoped.  Of course I’m probably spoiled by Visual Studio .NET.  :-)