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Mike Champion wrote:
> Hmmm ...In what sense is something like Amazon.com or eBay.com "late
> bound" if you look beyond the human interaction part of it (e.g., the
> human scrolling through a list of query results and looking for
> something to buy or bid on)? And in what sense are the HTML forms and
> POSTS on the client side and the CGI/JSP/ASP stuff on the client side
> *conceptually* different than Web services?
A difficult question to answer without a definition of "Web
Services". But I'll bite...
What CGI stuff on the client side? CGI defines an interface between
applications/scripts and websevers. It has nothing to do with the
Web's client/server contract; that's defined already by
HTTP/SMTP/FTP and so on. The existence of CGI doesn't change that,
though I'm happy enough that there is a separate gateway interface
rather than some function call weirdness tacked onto HTTP.
> What is REALLY different between "Web services" and the
> successful systems on the Internet that invoke significant server-side
> processing rather than simply moving representations around?
The difference is that most (all?) successful Internet systems are
keyed off protocols. As protocols they have semantics that make them
distinct from the 'protocol neutral' architecture implied by
SOAP/WSDL; something imvho needs to downgraded to 'transport
neutral' in the long term - there ain't no getting away from
protocols if we're serious about interoperating applications. Any
sufficiently complicated Web Services or SOAP based program contains
an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of
half of HTTP
;)
Bill de hÓra
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