Re: XML.COM: How I Learned to Love daBomb

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> > To me, one of the more perplexing things about this "web
> > services" buzz is that it seems so retrograde.  Network services
> > have indeed been possible (on at least UNIX :) for decades
> > now, and it isn't clear to me that SOAP is much of a change
> > except maybe with respect to marketing (and technical
> > details that are, in the big picture, minor).
> 
> No, I see diffrerence:
>  traditional network service solved technical tasks, not related to
> business. (file systems access, routing, etc) not related to business
> process of enterprise [may be one exception: LDAP]

I think the people who solved business process problems using
RPC systems would disagree with what you said.  OS developers
solved OS problems.  Application developers (by and large, ones
inside mid-to-large size enterprises -- the only ones who'd really
bought into distributed applications) solved different problems,
including business ones.  Those solutions weren't as visible.


>  web services are in the next layer: they solve business tasks, like
> order processing, customer information retryeving, etc.

As I said, retro:  people have been doing those with RPC systems
for decades.  That is, when they haven't been building them straight
on top of databases ... anyone with middleware-style requirements
was very likely to use an RPC framework to build their "services".

The sea-change the "web" brought was a cross-platform GUI,
based on HTML.  How the back-ends talk to each other has
often been either an RPC-ish thing or a messaging framework;
the "web services" buzz doesn't seem to change that in any
fundamental way.

- Dave