Cameron Laird's personal notes on Web Services

Here's the one-paragraph version of the story: "Web Services" is a terrible, confusing name (blame analysts--they're responsible for a specific incident) for a specific collection of standards having to do with highly interoperable distributed computing. The Web is about distributed content that people can read; Web Services does the same for programmability, so that distant computers can easily co-operate on calculations. Also, WS makes distributed computing fun in a way that was never true for closest competitors DCOM and CORBA (IIOP, really).

What does that mean? I know I can only understand such descriptions when fortified with concrete examples. Consider ...

[Answer correspondent's question: "...add a few more words on WS.html about what specific kinds of things fall into this category. For instance, is it a web service if someone like freefind.com provides cgi scripts to do search engines of a particular kind? What about sites which provide a cgi interface , or weather sites which provide cgi that can be used to embed a weather report, etc." ...]

I'll expand this page a great deal during Spring 2001. For now, I recommend:

I'm in the middle of a series of articles on programming WS with Tcl and other scripting languages, including

XMethods and Lucin provide two indexes to publicly-accessible Web Services.

[Distinguish WS and WSDL.]

I like the ORA interview with Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, and Edd Dumbill, nominally on XML-RPC. Their book [does ORA not yet have a URL for it?] is also valuable; I'll probably write a review at some point.

WS periodicals include


Cameron Laird's personal notes on Web Services/claird@phaseit.net
< .NET kills DHTML, and maybe browsers: http://www.devx.com/free/hotlinks/2001/ednote121901/ednote121901.asp The bottom line is: DHTML is dead for serious application development; browsers, as application delivery platforms, are past their peak; and the future of distributed, interactive applications—at least on Windows—belongs to .NET. If you're developing these types of applications and you're not learning .NET, you may want to rethink your career plans. -->