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2/13/2002 12:58:48 PM, Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> wrote:
>
>
> 2. On the technical side we have the semantic web which is about
>*integrating* information sources (through linking, addressing and
>predicate logic) versus RPC which naturally and accidentally balkanizes
>them.
Let me make sure I understand this "RPC accidentally balkanizes the Web"
argument well enough to articulate it in my own words: The promise of XML is
"portable Data", or liberating data from the application that created it.
The power of the Web is that it gives each chunk of data a unique
identity/address and a small set of generic, universally implemented
operations to move respresentations of these data chunks around. Thus, the
combination of URIs, HTTP, and XML could be the foundation for extremely
powerful Web Services, if used properly.
Using XML and HTML as an RPC mechanism tends to balkanize the Web, however,
because that
a) identifies resources by the SOAP message that accesses them rather than by
their URI [??? have I got this right???]
b) puts the application back at the center of the architecture, and uses XML
merely as a serialization mechanism and HTTP as a transport.
c) Thus, the data is no longer portable, and the operations are no longer
generic, so the Services Web is disjoint from the Web that we know today.
Finally, as I understand it, the practical implication of this is that
1 - SOAP as a packaging data into a convenient message format makes sense;
2 - An XML IDL perhaps similar to WSDL used as a metadata format for
describing the packages makes sense
3 - UDDI is a re-invention of what the Web does better already
4- The Way Ahead lies in teaching developers the power of HTTP and XML,
not hiding them behind Wizards, and RPC protocols.
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