{"id":371,"date":"2004-05-12T07:41:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-12T11:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=375"},"modified":"2004-05-12T07:41:00","modified_gmt":"2004-05-12T11:41:00","slug":"web-services-how-far-have-we-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2004\/05\/web-services-how-far-have-we-come\/","title":{"rendered":""Web" services; how far have we come?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I was thinking last night about how far – or not – we’d come in\nthe whole “Web vs. Web services” debates. In one respect we’ve come a\nlong way; you hardly ever hear the argument that “the Web requires humans!”.\nMany (but still not all) people remain indifferent about that; that the\nWeb may or may not be usable for this, but it’s moot anyhow, because the\n“World isn’t going that way”<\/a>. But that’s still pretty good,\nas it shifts the discussion into the more concrete and less subjective\nrealm of software architecture, allowing us to use reasonably well\nunderstood means of evaluating and comparing architectures for suitability\nto a particular problem domain.<\/p>\n\n

But on the other hand, the Web still doesn’t get the respect it\ndeserves from a lot of folk as a serious distributed computing\nplatform. I’ve just been reviewing some papers for\nMiddleware 2004<\/a>,\nand some of them talk about a variety of distributed computing platforms,\nyet all fail to mention the Web as a peer.<\/p>\n\n

There’s been a lot of low points, obviously, over the past four or\nfive years, but a few highlights too. Some of the latter include;<\/p>\n\n