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

[Al Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Tim Bray wrote:

> 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

Is it that bad to install a library as part of developing an application?
I mean, you install plenty of other libraries most of the time anyway! It
hasn't stopped Gnome applications from succeeding (they need a *lot* of
libraries).

> - 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.

I've never seen a serious RPC facility that doesn't have this feature :-)

> Also the HTTP prejudice makes it very little work to integrate into
> existing web infrastructure.

That's closer to the mark

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

Yeah :'-(

>  -Tim

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software