Here an excerpt from GRIDtoday. For me, DRMAA seems to be a perfect counter-example ;-) ... Regards, Peter.

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[ ] M545661 ) William Fellows on the Year Ahead in Grid Computing By Derrick Harris, Editor

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Gt: What can we expect in the field of standards throughout the year? Will the oft-maligned standards community finally get its act together and develop some widely adoptable standards?

FELLOWS: The world of standards has contributed very little to commercial, enterprise Grid computing. The proliferation of Grid industry bodies only means more confusion, not less, and has throttled momentum. The standards that do exist today are not relevant and there is no evidence that standards are being used in implementations or that any product is being built using them. If grids can find a place in one of the open source stacks, such as LAMP, it would undoubtedly help further adoption. ... Gt: Where do end-users play into the standards debate? Will we begin to see a strong interoperability push from major end-users?

FELLOWS: Looking at actual implementations, early adopters don't appear -- by and large -- to care much about standards, except those de facto ones that reign in particular markets such as Oracle and Linux. But, ask early adopters what they want, and they typically want standardization of the stack and APIs like data input/output. They want one set of standards and one stack. Not multiple. They say the growing number of Grid industry bodies suggests confusion and growing complexity in approach, not standardization.

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In some sectors, there are de facto standards, but there is no Grid stack yet. In other sectors, users are pressuring suppliers to integrate. Major banks have asked Platform Computing and DataSynapse to create a plan to allow their respective middleware to share resources. Presently, the two require dedicated resources.