What are web services good for? (WAS: RE: Two new features of th eWeb)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

What are web services good for?  What are they not good for?

Useful topics:  contract-based business (not the interface contract of the 
remote systems, but the contracts for services among the businesses), 
orchestration of processes to ensure compliant deliverables, hierarchical 
review and remote decision making (authority and delegation); how 
are QOS issues and defaults on contracts detected and handled?

I have this sense that some consider web services another technology in 
search of a problem to solve.   I have this sense that the simple solution 
advocated may promise but cannot deliver when the requirements become 
complex.  Are web services just a document management system writ large 
or can they enable a very wide distributed application that does more 
than post weblogs?

A crab moves but for the crab, sideways is forward.  When there 
are obstacles, that well may be so, so a survey of the terrain is in 
order to determine the path to a goal.  If the path has no goals 
that can be clearly expressed, then the direction is meaningless. 
This is as true for the web as for the crab.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


From: Dave Winer [mailto:dave@userland.com]

Check this out:

http://www.google.com/search?q=blogger+xml-rpc

Two new features:

1. Google is indexing much more frequently. Blogger and XML-RPC is a new
thing. Just started in August (this year).

2. Look at all the support that's building for Blogger as a Web service.

So the Web keeps moving forward despite all the reasons for not doing so.