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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Wasting half a trillion dollars?
 There is a full-page PeopleSoft ad in today's (Monday: The Information Industries) business section of the New York Times. Above the fold, the page is filled with the headline: Last year, code on the client cost businesses half a trillion dollars. That is followed for the next quarter page with "How much is it costing your business?" and then the following paragraph nestled at the bottom: PeopleSoft 8. The only enterprise solution with no code on the client. Every year, your company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars maintaining software on each individual PC. But PeopleSoft runs entirely on the internet, and that makes it accessible from any web browser, anytime. So you can work collaboratively with your customers, suppliers, and employees, in realtime, from anywhere in the world. Which opens the door to a whole new way of doing business. Suddenly, "no code on the client" is more than a strategy to cut implementation costs. It's the key to running your business more efficiently and making your people incredibly productive. And most importantly, it's exactly what you need to create a profitable, competitive, collaborative enterprise. At the bottom is the PeopleSoft tagline: "People power the internet." This reads (at least to me) as if it were consciously designed as an anti-advertisement; that is, I can hardly imagine a more perfectly backward message. I will gladly take as a first premise--indeed, an article of faith--that 'people power the internet'. Indeed they do, and I am further pleased to see the small-'i' spelling of 'internet'. This is precisely what internetworking is about: local networks built to local standards which perfectly express, and facilitate, the functions of the individuals whose expertise is the raison d'etre of those networks. To achieve 'best of breed' functionality we do not impose standard processes, or standard data structures, on those who perform those uniquely valuable functions. Instead, we interconnect with a single addressing scheme these individually customised networks. This is the internetwork (or Internet) topology, which is in place and functioning well. Yet when the question is no longer 'how do we route packets among these local networks (some as small as a single IP-addressable node)', but instead 'how do we distribute processing (or execute transactions) between these nodes', how can the answer suddenly be that we must abandon the local autonomy that the internetwork was designed and built to protect? Surely the 'internet' answer (and the answer which best respects the primacy of people, as individuals) is that we should route procedure calls, or data structures populated to trigger processing, blindly, just as we do any packets, relying on the recipient to do the right thing given its unique context and own expertise. The perfect expression of that expertise and acknowledgment of that specific context is, in fact, 'code on the client'. That code may exist in only one place and may be designed and implemented on principles and to standards seen nowhere else. It is the function of an internetwork to make just such processing available to nodes which because of local constraints of their own cannot be built on those particular premises and therefore not implement that precise functionality. This 'code on the client' is worth building because it is the exact expression of the best particular expertise for a given process. It is worth the expense of maintaining because it is a uniquely valuable common resource--common because it is (at least potentially) available to all through the internetwork addressing scheme, not because it depends on a priori agreement on the standards to which it should be built. Respectfully, Walter Perry 
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