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RE: The Battle for Web Services

• To: "Jonathan Robie" <jonathan.robie@d...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: The Battle for Web Services
• From: "Chris Wilper" <cwilper@c...>
• Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 13:36:58 -0400
• Thread-index: AcOM5VH1QDmCYWjnQkuFvd7yquHQRwAAV7lQ
• Thread-topic: The Battle for Web Services

> Is this article accurate? Is there any hope for the situation to improve?

Sure; people who make investments in new technologies are always gambling.

Companies interested in doing the WS-Thing would do well to limit the
investment to HTTP, XML, WSDL, and SOAP (in that order), steer 
clear of /WS-.*/ for a while and concentrate on what matters:
the *services*.

Take web data-mining.  Web scraping is alive and brittle in 2003.  
Not because of the adoption of or completion of UDDI, WS BPEL, 
WS-CAF, WSDM, WSDM, WSIA, WSRP, WSRM, WS-Security (or lack thereof).  
But for the simple reason that web-based data providers are still 
thinking only of one user-agent.  That's where the change needs to 
happen.

You know, Google and Amazon did some cool stuff.  XMethods has nice
listing of (mostly "toy") public web services.  But in large part, 
the useful "services" on the web are still HTML-only.  

That ain't right.

- Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@d...]
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 11:10 AM
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject:  The Battle for Web Services


Just saw this article:

	The Battle for Web Services
	by Christopher Koch
           CIO Magazine, Oct. 1, 2003
           http://www.cio.com/archive/100103/standards.html

This article suggests that the overlap in Web services standards is going 
to force companies to waste a great deal of money:

 > IT'S ALREADY A GIVEN: Your company is going to waste money on Web
 > services.
 >
 > Research company Gartner predicts American business is going to
 > squander $1 billion on misguided Web services projects by
 > 2007. Exactly how much of that will come out of your pocket depends
 > in part on how many confusing, overlapping Web services standards
 > emerge in the next few years.
 >
 > Right now, it looks like there's going to be a lot of them.

It claims that the standardization process has fragmented, basically into 
two camps, and that there is a great deal of duplication and confusion:

 > The Web services standards process began to fall apart this year. No
 > fewer than four organizations - Liberty Alliance, Oasis, W3C and
 > WS-I - are vying to preside over the process, each with different
 > goals, each with differing degrees of power and influence.
 >
 > And two opposing camps of vendors have emerged: an uneasy alliance
 > of IBM and Microsoft versus nearly everyone else. Both groups are
 > busy duplicating each other's work.
 >
 > Both are proposing Web services specifications - some proprietary,
 > some not - with unclear patent and licensing implications for
 > CIOs. In an arena as complex as Web services, confusion is not a
 > good thing. But right now, that's the situation.

Is this article accurate? Is there any hope for the situation to improve?

Jonathan


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