WPS Smackdown

I was a little surprised last week when Jody Garnett told me that the most contentious session of FOSS4G turned out to be the “WPS compliance testing” talk. Really? “Really”, Jody insisted, “Voices were raised.”

Over web processing service (WPS) compliance? Well, we are all knee-jerk nerds, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The results were presented by just one WPS project, the 52North one, but tested a broad swathe of them. I think the lesson to be learned is that you should be careful testing other people’s software, and even more careful when brandishing the results of those tests.

The WMS benchmarking exercise, where each team runs their own service, seems like a better model, though demonstrably hard to coordinate in its own right.

The ZooWPS team has now published their response, so if you are interested in WPS, here’s a chance to dig deep into XML response payloads. Yum.