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

[jwells123 <jwells123@email.msn.com>]

What I'm not clear about is the feasibility of distributing systems across
the Internet. In Wrox's "Introducing .NET," the chapter on Web Services
tells me it's a Good Idea for the components of a site to be hosted all over
the Web because then the publishers of those components can upgrade them
without having to distribute the upgrades to clients. I can think of four
potential problems to begin with:

1. Upgrading software used by your site can be hairy when you DO know about
it and approve of it, let alone otherwise.

2. The Internet isn't known for reliability. Sites which must rely on remote
components can use message queuing to improve reliability, but at the cost
of response time.

3. Speaking of response time, component developers have been taught for
years that it's a sin to make method calls across apartments, let alone
across processes, machines, networks, or the Internet.

4. What happens if the provider of a Web Service folds?

I've seen all four of these problems when working with CyberCash (they've
filed for Chapter 11, though they still seem to be there). They provided a
remote credit card authentication service which, in fact, had a reasonably
nice COM interface not unlike a Web Service.

I asked someone at MS about this and the answer I got was similar to Gates'
statement in his keynote speech introducing .NET: no, it's not practical
right now, but should be in a few years.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:01 AM
Subject: RE: What are web services good for? (WAS: RE: Two new features o f
the Web)


> 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?"  As previous discussions have indicated,
> "web services" are not all that much different from what people can do
with
> the Web today (OK, Web services are for machines, not people ...) and
we've
> been able to do remote procedure calls on Unix for decades, over COM/CORBA
> for years ... what's the big deal?  Why do I see assertions such as
"There's
> little argument that XML Web services are the future of computing"
> http://www.aspnews.com/trends/article/0,2350,9921_868321,00.html every
time
> I look at the trade press?