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Re: Tuesday, December 10, 2002
I wouldn't dismiss the Web Services/CORBA comparison so quickly, Doc -- or rather, the SOAP/CORBA comparison. First, the main drivers behind Web Services in the industry and the large enterprise world are IBM and Microsoft (Websphere and .Net, respectively) -- while I agree on the ground there are a large number of grassroots developers driving the thing forward and that's encouraging, the muscle comes from the big boys, and the ship will turn the way they want it to turn, when they want it to turn. Second, and more importantly, SOAP is essentially RPC wrapped in HTTP, and thus is vulnerable to the lame old API-as-control-point game that makes windows such a sucky client platform. It also pretty much guarantees that that SOAP-based Web Services will ultimately fail because they won't scale reliably. API-based distributed apps get brittle and providers of APIs twiddle with their calls stupidly or maliciously and the house of cards collapses. Contrast DNS, SMTP, HTTP or other genuinely successful Internet-native applications and you'll see not APIs but protocols. Check out Marshall Rose's BXXP standard for a brilliant implementation of the architectural lessons the 'net can teach... BTW, the reliance on APIs is what makes me so certain that Web Services will remain a plaything of industry giants. **I'm not speaking for my employer**
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