RE: What are web services good for? (WAS: RE: Two new features o f the Web)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 02:01 PM 21/08/01 -0400, Champion, Mike wrote:
>I'm glad you posted this question ... I was about to do the same thing.
>Irrespective of the details of SOAP, UDDI/WSDL/whatever, .NET ... why has
>this become the "next big thing?"

You can see XML-RPC/SOAP and hangers-on as an RPC facility that
is unusually transparent - in that you can see how it all works
and implement it yourself without recourse to complex libraries
beyond an XML parser - and at the same time unusually opaque - 
in that you really aren't going to break things by changing 
from a little-endian to a big-endian architecture, or from
Win2K to Solaris, or whatever.  These are probably good things
in an RPC facility.  Also the HTTP prejudice makes it very
little work to integrate into existing web infrastructure.

Having said all that, the hype level is really getting silly.
 -Tim