Patrick Logan writes, in response to another high profile “Web wins, Web wins!” post, this one
by Mitch Kapor;
[…] how long before a web *server* is as common place on the laptop as the web browser is today?
Not as long as you might think, especially with wonderful hacks like a
Javascript Web server(!!)
You can also do it the easy way, like I did for the
company
I founded in 2001; a combination J2ME Web browser and Web server for the RIM
Blackberry. Man, the fun we had with that … RSS POSTs to Web pages with the
update reflected in the bookmark list, remote editing of calendars and notepad
entries… The sky was – and still is – the limit.
Avoid the
distractions;
the Web is where the action’s at.
A couple of interesting snippets from Graham Glass. The first was a
New Year’s resolution, “Evangelize the Semantic Web”.
The second was a
prediction;
The Semantic Web replaces Web Services as the most talked-about topic in the world of software, with emphasis on RDF and metadata.
I don’t expect the prediction to be realized – at least not this year –
but it’s good to see this coming from the CTO of a Web services player.
Presumably
Webmethods
has got something SemWeb-centric cooking. Good for them. I just hope
it’s not based on the
"-S" stuff
which (largely) presumes a Web services architecture rather than the Web itself.
I was blown away today when I read Graham Glass’ blog to
learn
that
Rocky Stewart passed away
this past October. Rocky was a brilliant, out-spoken technologist
and educator who I had the pleasure of interacting with on many
occasions in the mid/late 90s, on and off the Distributed Objects mailing
list.
If there’s any consolation to be taken from this loss, I suppose
it would be that he died flying his plane, which was his absolute passion.
My condolences to his family.
Hmm, somehow I’m just not too excited about things this year. Perhaps
this has something to do with me making the most intriguing prediction –
the inevitable death of Web services on the Internet –
three years ahead, two years ago.
But first, let’s see how I did with
last years predictions…
As alluded to above, I said that Web services would continue to struggle
for adoption on the Internet, and
lo and behold,
that’s the case. Ho hum. +1
I also claimed that another high profile public Web service would be
released. I can’t think of any really high profile announcements this past
year except for
eBay
I guess, but theirs seems SOAP-only, and isn’t public. Bloglines announced their
services, but AFAICT,
they’re REST-inspired only with no SOA side. So I guess I flubbed that one.
Ok, so this year, hmmm… As I see it, things have really got to start
hitting the fan in the SOA space. To that end, I make the following two predictions;
- at least one prominent second tier Web services ISV will move away
from WS-* and towards an architectural style which adopts a constrained
interface, such as REST, MEST, MOM, or one of the Grid styles.
- a prominent Web services architect will have a
Gestalt moment
and realize that the Web is actually what Web services have been trying
to become since they started down the “document orientation” path in 2001.
This person will embrace the Web and REST, though it will be done in a
manner which saves face for them and their employer, thereby making it
difficult to determine that this is, in fact, what has happened.
I did the little I could today, to help with
the cleanup from the horrific Indian Ocean tsunami; I gave to
Oxfam Canada.
Please consider
doing the same.
I just discovered
this article
by David, apparently reprinted from an old
weblog entry
that I must have missed while at XML 2004. While I think I’ve
said my piece
on the topic of distributed objects vs. services, I wanted to respond to a
couple of points in the article …
First, in the “State” section, Dave seems to make the mistake of
confusing the different types of state (or at least the different
locations of state). He says “Web resources that have a URI
that are stateless and work with HTTP GET”, which is clearly not the
case, since any resource that answers a GET request answers it with a
representation of their state. When you hear “stateless” in the
context of the Web architecture, it’s usually in reference to the protocol,
not the resource … though you can, of course, have stateless resources if
you want to.
I’m also not sure where he’s going with “on the Web” bit. It’s a cute
phrase, but doesn’t seem to hold a lot of technical value.
But the next three paragraphs seem to mix the different types of state
up willy-nilly such that you can’t really make sense of it. The major
theme does seem to be about services with state, yet Dave makes reference
to conversational/application state mechanisms such as cookies. Perhaps I’m
missing something.
Next, in “Network knowledge”, he adds;
Effectively, Web services is remote method invokes but with knowledge of the remoteness.
I won’t disagree with that, but what the heck happened to document
orientation?! That was the single most significant architectural advancement
upon RPC that I’d seen come out of the Web services space since it began
(at least from a service POV – clients were still as
tightly coupled
to the services they used as with RPC).
“Everything in moderation, including moderation” 8-) Certainly a propos for the holiday season.
(
link) [
del.icio.us/distobj]
“If you simply build [Extensible Markup Language]-based applications and keep them behind the firewall, you can’t call them Web services” – Amen
(
link) [
del.icio.us/distobj]
In response to an
issue I proposed
in the WSA WG,
this;
can we avoid going down the standard “mark baker” issues here?
Ouch! That hurt. But sure, you can ignore them. You do so at your peril,
but feel free.
You just might want to keep in mind how previous attempts at doing that have
(not) worked out.