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Aaron Skonnard wrote:
>
>...
>
> The key difference with the Web services is that the technology appeals
> more to business applications than end-user applications.
The "user pull" I'm speaking of is not end-user pull but developer pull.
The developers are the consumers of specifications and development
technologies. There is a subset of developers who follow Microsoft's
every move and another subset who are more interested in what takes off
in the open source and Unix worlds. The prevalence of Apache
demonstrates that this latter group has power out of proportion with
their numbers.
One vision for the future of web services is that the vendors choose the
technologies, deploy them within businesses for EAI and then across
business boundaries for B2B and non-EAI or non-B2B projects either adopt
the same technologies or go their own way.
An alternate vision is that both groups will fumble around in the dark
for a few years until a disruptive technology arrives that is the key
that was missing. This disruptive technology is much more likely to
arise outside of the vendor groupthink that initially resisted the
Internet and then the Web.
I have no evidence that this latter scenario is the one that will come
about but my instinct says that reinventing SUN RPC as SOAP and IDL as
WSDL and ASN.1 as XML and SQL as XQuery and ... will not get us to a
fundamentally different place than the first go-round with those
technologies did. I admit, I could be wrong. But something feels wrong
about piling on layers of complexity hoping that they will provide us
with a stairway to heaven.
No, REST is not a disruptive technology (anymore!). For me, it is just
an attempt to preserve what was right about the Web while we figure out
what needs to be added to get us to easy e-business.
Paul Prescod
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