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Re: Doing Web services right

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: Re: Doing Web services right
• From: =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Bill_de_h=D3ra?= <bill@d...>
• Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 00:12:35 +0000
• Cc: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EEEAD045@h...> <20030311152343.W2173@w...> <oprlv1t8akezizxn@s...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

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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