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I took some time yesterday to read the thread referenced,
and it seems the people in that thread do have a reasonable
grasp of the issues of looking at the frequency of messaging,
the coarseness of the transactions, and so forth. Still, I
see tutorial examples of using a web service to add two integers
and I shudder because some will copy and paste and move on.
I suppose because I am old school, I tend to think of services
at the level of the enterprise organizational interfaces, report
types, etc. I'm not a big fan of the service as a means to
build all of the intra-prise communications but only because
experience has shown us the value of the fat client that does
a lot of rule validation on the local very powerful desktop
machine. We see web services and the web in general as the
ideal system if the requirement has a dominant external
communication quality and is not extremely frequent. For
businesses such as ours in which agencies doing roughly the
same kind of work with local variations, that model works.
It will take some effort to create an organizational/enterprise
API and sell that to enough customers that the API is
generally useful and predictable.
My horror is not the naive programmer. Sooner than later,
the machine itself will teach them where they are going
wrong. The beauty of computer science is the computer
is the best teacher. My nightmare is a consultant
selling my customer on notions that are either
good on paper but bad in the current technology, or old
as dirt and already done. In the first case, we have to
show a customer they paid for something of no worth, and
in the second case, we have to rewrite all the explanations
in terms of obsolete or obscure terminology. When these
folks latch onto web services, watch out.
len
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]
On Wednesday 09 January 2002 04:58 pm, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> So perhaps the question is, when should one RPC/SOAP
> vs replication? It brings up the topic of how one
> should architect for web services not at the level
> of SOAP, but the actual decomposition of services.
This is very, very true. Again, a bank I visited used Notes with replication
because in their environment (admittedly poor) replication was more reliable,
and loaded the network less, than a centralized network service.
I've been telling people for years that they should look before they leap.
Many of the more costly projects I've seen have resulted from poor planning,
poor analysis, or inappropriate use.
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