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Web Services Making Software Coexist? 200

Posted by Hemos from the get-together-right-now dept.
jgeelan writes "Despite the competitive uproar, coexistence of J2EE and .NET will be the norm and most sophisticated IT organizations will deploy on both development platforms. Who says so? No less an authority than the CTO of J2EE powerhouse BEA Systems, Scott Dietzen, writing in this month's Web Services Journal. Dietzen acknowledges that an ongoing conflict is in progress between Java and C# and between J2EE and the .NET server family and is refeshingly honest, admitting that "there is some truth to the 'write once, test everywhere' complaint against Java." His overall conclusion: ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces, while J2EE continues to enjoy its sweet spot for server-side applications." Unusual honesty by someone so highly placed. Isn't this just what the software industry needs more of, in these increasingly interoperable times?"
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Web Services Making Software Coexist? More

Web Services Making Software Coexist?

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  • ... its all about .mac
    • I want them all. For my mac, my wintel, my hey-the-video-card-with-this-release Redhat. As a SysAdmin for a small company I don't wan to worry if the 'new thing' will run on the Marketing Depts OS9 macs, the COO's OSX laptop, or the linux that runs the POS in the pizza joints.
  • I think an 800 pound gorilla is about to get a caffine buzz from drinking java!

  • Honesty or idiocy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:20AM (#4003289) Homepage
    ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces,"

    On a single platform, perhaps. It's true enough that early editions of Java's Swing weren't the swiftest UIs on the block, Swing has to contend with being platform independant. How well does a .NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?

    The UI for most server-side applications is probably HTML, anyway, so I'm not sure what his point was. I suspect BEA is just making nice noises toward .NET to gain a foot in the door of MS-only shops, although it is certainly true that at the SOAP level .NET and J2EE could interact.

    We'll see how long that lasts when/if .NET market share catches up with J2EE. (Embrace and extend, anyone?)

    • Re:Honesty or idiocy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TummyX ( 84871 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:28AM (#4003315)

      On a single platform, perhaps. It's true enough that early editions of Java's Swing weren't the swiftest UIs on the block, Swing has to contend with being platform independant. How well does a .NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?

      The UI for most server-side applications is probably HTML, anyway, so I'm not sure what his point was.

      That is the point. C#, ASP.NET and VS.NET are the perfect combination if you want to make HTML based UIs. You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#. The C# is compiled into a server side component along with some ASPX pages. The UI is completely HTML based and cross platform. The HTML generated can be transformed to work on all types of browsers (utilising the features of each). Anything that can't be done client side is done on the server side.

      You pretty much write HTMl pages the same way you would write a standard GUI application and .NET takes care of the rest. Its a great way to program HTML UIs. And I think that was part of his point.
      • You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#. The C# is compiled into a server side component along with some ASPX pages.

        Okay, I'll grant you that seems like a pretty cool development environment (for that sort of thing). But it isn't .NET specific, there's no fundamental reason why a similar IDE couldn't be done for JSP. Indeed, it probably already has.

        • Re:Honesty or idiocy? (Score:5, Informative)

          by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Saturday August 03, 2002 @01:15AM (#4003458) Homepage
          I don't know about for Java, but VisualWorks Smalltalk (there's a free, non-commercial version for download for Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, many other Unices) that does something like this. Using one single UI builder, you construct a GUI for the traditional GUI application. From the same spec it generates, a web application and interface. You define callbacks and such just like you would for a regular app, and VisualWave (the web app toolkit) takes care of the rest of it.

          VisualWorks has had this ability for quite a while, at least 4 years or so, which was the first time I played with it. I don't doubt that there may have been something before it that did the same thing, but it preceeds .NET and probably even a similar Java tool.
          • Smalltalk has been phased out by IBM, and the widget elemnts etc are old. Perhaps we could use .NET to fix programmer UI errors like the slashdot messageboard UI ugh!

            • Re:Honesty or idiocy? (Score:2, Informative)

              by m3573 ( 595099 )

              Smalltalk has been phased out by IBM, and the widget elemnts etc are old.

              Squeak is being developed and it's open source: it looks like a toy but its approach to user interaction using "morphs" is interesting.

              Cincom (its smalltalk site slashdotted? :) ) is developing version 7 [cincomsmalltalk.com] of visualworks smalltalk, and it will surely be out before i finish checking out all the features of version 5 :)

              The widgets are a little dated indeed, but being a very modular system there may be GUI enhancements to download, try looking around.

              I'm impressed with some smalltalk environment features, like being able to modify some code (which gets dynamically recompiled, no "build" command) and having the changes reflected on the application while it is running, being able to inspect and extend system classes (smalltalk applications merely extend the system, in fact), being able to save and restore all classes and variables i'm working with in a single image file or in distinct packages.

              I'd like to know if there is a java environment with similar features.

              • IBM's VisualAge for Java has features similar to many Smalltalk environments. Surprise, surprise- it was written in Smalltalk. :)

                I personally do development in Smalltalk (using Squeak), and I love it. One of my projects over the last few years was enhancing the IRC client built into Squeak. I was adding the ability to have bots. In a couple days of hacking, I didn't have to restart the application once- all objects of the classes being changed had the updated methods as soon as I saved them. Then, I wasn't a newbie anymore, but it still amazed me then, and still does now. I shudder to think how much time extra it would take to have to recompile and restart after every insigificant change of code.

                Aaron

          • Re:Honesty or idiocy? (Score:2, Interesting)

            by zacks ( 106548 )
            no one here seems to acknowledge macromedia products here, slashdot readers amkes the world seems to be php and mysql based... mysql is not a proper relational database (yet).... just becase something is free doesn't mean it's the best solution... when a developer costs more than one software license per day, the argument looks a little weak..

            the real agurment here is how long does it take to develop out of the box a simple or complex application... cold fusion is simple a much faster language, yes it's actually more 4gl than 3gl, but what are u trying to do? pull some data out of the database and display it....

            in cf that means 2 tags (opened and closed) and var names and html

            <cfquery name="test" datasource="localserver">
            select name, email, description
            from users
            where active = 1
            order by name
            </cfquery>

            <cfoutput query="test">
            #name# - #email#
            #description#
            </cfoutput>

            looks quite clean huh?

            why not look at at coldfusion mx, a j2ee application server, where the tag based language makes things simple and you can always fall back to java.

            The when you want a more complex decent ui than is possible with html, use flash, w3c dom is great but not so prevalent..

            and flash makes for a much for reliable user expierence than dhtml

          • I think Apple's WebObjects did a decent job with Java in that respect.

            The problem is that the .NET tools are more polished, and the J2EE tools are lacking. The advantage of Java, right now, is the J2EE de facto standard... it's already doing what the companies want it to do, and they already have an investment in it, and there's no reason not to have the equivalent of a VS.NET for J2EE that works without propietary dependencies.

      • The programmer's IDE is not a feature of the language nor the .net archetecture. For example, tab-completion of function names is not a feature of Visual Basic. It's a feature of MS Developer Studio.

        HTML generated can be transformed to work on all types of browsers (utilising the features of each)

        Or it could have just been written to te W3c spec in the first place. No, that wouldn't be the MS way. Instead make something that has to know which browser you are using and change its behaviour accordingly. (Which of course fails utterly to be *forward* compatable with new and improved browsers you haven't heard of yet. I'm sick of websites that tell me I need to "upgrade" to Netscape 4.76 or I.E. 5.0 when I'm running something *newer* that would work if the site would just send me the HTML it would have sent to one of those two browsers.)

        • But, some of us actually want to use features not in all browsers. I don't really want to have to code separate versions of every page for Netscape 1.0 and for Lynx. You see, the world has changed since 1994. Really. It has.

          Anyone who's done web pages for real has had to deal with browser compatibility. The ASP.NET approach of emitting different HTML for different browsers makes this a LOT less of a pain.

          • I don't really want to have to code separate versions of every page for Netscape 1.0 and for Lynx.
            Well, it's a good thing that what I advocated was the exact opposite of that, then.


            Anyone who's done web pages for real has had to deal with browser compatibility. The ASP.NET approach of emitting different HTML for different browsers makes this a LOT less of a pain.
            But the types of servers you speak of don't check for *features* supported. They check for brand names, and that's the complaint I have. Just because a browser visiting your page is one you didn't test for, that doesn't automatically mean it can't do the features you need. It's that broken mentality that makes new up-and-coming browsers like Opera have to lie about what kind of browser they are in order to use certain sites developed with a mentality similar to yours. The reason they have to lie just to get the HTML shipped to them is that the servers aren't programed with a default case of "just spit out w3c standard stuff and if the browser can't deal with it that's the browser's fault." So places that program only to IE, or only to IE and Netscape continue to believe the lie that those are the only browsers that exist (because people have to browse with the user-agent string set to the lie that they are IE or Netscape), and that's what shows up in all logs then.

      • That is the point. C#, ASP.NET and VS.NET are the perfect combination if you want to make HTML based UIs. You just drag a button onto a webpage, double click and write the event handling code in C#.

        That is kind of suspect since real HTML is flow-based and not coordinate-based. Thus, MS is probably breaking a standard or making up a new one, unless I am missing something here. (I suppose you could use style-sheet absolute positioning, but that was buggy on some browsers when I tried.)

        (BTW, Remote via-HTTP GUI's are highly possible IMO. Web forms for biz apps don't work very well for non-trivial stuff IMO. There are technology drafts like XWT and SCGUI for remote GUI's. They just need a big-name push.)
      • You pretty much write HTMl pages the same way you would write a standard GUI application and .NET takes care of the rest. Its a great way to program HTML UIs. And I think that was part of his point.

        But surely you get a lot less flexibility? I seem to recall MS tried to rewrite Outlook in DHTML, the project bombed, as HTML (even with loads of IE extensions) just wasn't suitable for user interfaces. That's why Mozilla created XUL (which is). How does it deal with things like snap-off toolbars, popup menus, zigzagged underlines and all the other stuff that's either impossible or extremely hard to do with HTML?

        It sounds like you'd end up with an extremely limited and rather slow widget set - a bit like AWT in fact. On the other hand, I haven't tried it, so what do I know?

    • Re:Honesty or idiocy? (Score:3, Informative)

      by wadetemp ( 217315 )
      How well does a .NET UI run on a Solaris workstation?

      Actually you answered your own question. It runs fine, if its an ASP.NET UI. Working on HTML/JavaScript based UI is nearly the same process as developing a client side UI in .NET, given the event-based programming model and similar UI classes for both. Granted, you can't yet run a pure Windows.Forms application on Solaris, but you didn't ask "how well does a .NET Windows Forms UI run on a Solaris workstation," did you? :)
      • you didn't ask "how well does a .NET Windows Forms UI run on a Solaris workstation," did you? :)

        Well not specifically, no, but the context was comparing with Java and Swing. Swing is hardly the UI used by JSP or servlets, HTML/JavaScript is.

        Kind of a moot question, otherwise, eh?
    • so true because Solaris is used on soooooooo many workstations, these days its obvious that Dietzen's generalization is obviously wrong, what the hell is he doing as the CTO of BEA anyway.

      Jeez isn't it fun being a zealot.

  • More Python Please! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by supton ( 90168 )
    Ugh... I'm sick of these industry horses wearing blinders. There are more than two choices, of course. When .NET and J2EE developers finally get sick of watching their compilers sing and dance, I'll still be here adding new features to my Python applications at run time in a much better language. :)
    • Oh, you can make J2EE sing and dance with Python, too, if you want.

      You have heard of Jython [jython.org] (nee JPython), haven't you?

      (And you can add new features to Java applications at run time too (ClassLoader? JavaBeans? hello?). But of course you knew that. :)
    • word up, python rules! i wish everyone else would see the light!

      ...python for the jvm
      http://www.jython.org/

      ...python for the clr
      http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/dotnet/in dex.html
    • And I'll be building even better applications via a web, telnet, or regular GUI interface at runtime in a much better language, Smalltalk. :)

      But yeah, you're very right. There are many options other than .NET and Java. I know there isn't much for Python, but there are a few companies (IBM, Cincom, GemStone) that provide real commercial support for their web app server products.
    • Of course, you could always use python.NET to write your ASP.NET pages if you don't want to learn C#.

      http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/dotnet/ in dex.html
  • I'm sorry, but for all the "honesty" of this article, Dietzen is trying to act as if there is an equivalence of evolution between .Net and J2EE, and Java and C#. Despite the huge Microsoft push, there is still an enormous amount of development of .Net and C# that still needs to come, and a significant amount of widespread acceptance/usage before they should be included in the same article.

    Java and J2EE are realities that real world developers have been working on for years. Years.

    Have C# and .Net even been fully documented yet? How many months do you have to have worked with them to be considered old dog on the development team? Have they been in the wild, real world tested yet? Are they really anything other then Microsoft marketing concepts that they're giving the full court press to?

    • How many months do you have to have worked with them to be considered old dog on the development team?

      18? It's not like it just came out yesterday, the beta has been available for at least a year and a half. Wrox put out books on programming with the beta languages and the beta framework.
      • 18 months is just about long enough to get the experience needed to shake out the first set of design bugs. I vaguely recall it was about that time frame to go from Java 1.0 to 1.1, which saw some significant improvements. But there were still a few more more signficant changes from 1.1 to 1.2 (aka Java2).

        Granted, with .NET Microsoft has the advantage of learning some lessons that Java pioneered, but it's still a Microsoft 1.0 product. There'll be shakeouts yet.

    • Re:Since when have .Net/C# proven themselves? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PyroPunk ( 545300 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @12:49AM (#4003381) Homepage
      The consulting firm I work at has deployed a Point Of Sale system running on the .Net framework; it's currently running in 4 restaurants. The touchscreen GUI was written in C#, as was the business and data tiers. We use .Net remoting to communicate between the touchscreen and the server. Just started development using the .Net compact framework to let the waiters use Pocket PC devices when taking orders. I've been developing in .Net since June of last year; deployed two intranet sites and an e-commerce site since then. Have been developing in Java since '97. I personally don't consider one better than the other; but then again I'm not out there fighting a religious battle against Microsoft either.
      • It's good to know someone sees C# and java for what it is, A Tool! IMO, it's good that those devices are switching to standard protocols, but it's hardly new. Wireless point of sales systems for restaurants have existed since early 90's. I know for a fact because in southern California, I went to a restaurant where a friend worked that had a wireless sytem. My friend would take the order and it would be sent wireless to a terminal for the cooks to see.

        Having standard ways to do remote communication is good, but all the bloated hype from all the various camps does a lot of dis-service. As far as I'm concerned, all the big tech companies are guilty of it, so it's not like MS or Sun are worse than others. The real benefit for businesses with technologies like C#, Java, .NET and web services is standard protocols and frameworks. The chances of a company finding skilled replacement when staff leave is more likely than a non-standard proprietary system. For me, the hassle of marketoid gibberish is worth it to move towards more standard and flexible ways of developing software.

    • Call me a cynical deconstructionist, but I think it's more important to realize what BEA is trying to do with comments like this.

      Clearly, BEA needs to grow over the next decade, and has to be very careful about the inevitable market power that Microsoft will have with .Net. Whether or not you you like it versus J2EE, Microsoft has the deep pockets to basically buy a market position for .Net over the next five years. BEA is king of the hill today, in a Java dominated market. As .Net grows, there will be a new niche opening. That might be filled by Microsoft itself, but it will be just as attractive for a more enterprise-oriented new company to fill if BEA doesn't.

      BEA isn't stupid. It realizes it has to be ready as a potential Microsoft partner, or it risks limiting its dominant position in the application servers and related software market to the Java side of the world. That's why it's being so "honest" about things like this.
  • Probably the biggest complaint that one could have against web services is the difficulty involved in getting separate ones to interoperate.

    Imagine you have a web-based e-mail system. And a web-based word-document reader. One written in J2EE and one written in .NET. Click on a word attachment in the e-mail program, any guess as to whether or not it will open in your word-document reader? Answer is nope!

    That people are just now figuring out that demanding that all things be written in One True Language to be hosted on One True Platform from One Designated Service Provider is kinda sad - doesn't that sound restrictive?

    Of course, my commentary on this issue isn't coming from nowhere - I wrote [appslink.com] a service designed to fix the problem, at its core. But just because I'm biased doesn't mean I'm wrong.

    • Imagine you have a web-based e-mail system. And a web-based word-document reader. One written in J2EE and one written in .NET. Click on a word attachment in the e-mail program, any guess as to whether or not it will open in your word-document reader? Answer is nope!

      Err...yes, of course it will if you've set the MIME type correctly.

      Cheers,
      Ian

  • It's an unfortunate truth that saying something honest will get you much fewer eyeballs. Slashdot even perpetuates this by posting purposely controversial viewpoints. I mean, which is more controversial, "Linux and Windows both have their place" or

    "Linux on the desktop is dead! Windows on the server is dead!"

    The fact is that the "x and y both have their place" articles, although honest, are much less likely to get published, because media outlets know that less controversial opinions just aren't talked about as much.

    This thread will be lucky to receive 200 comments. Had the article submitted been "Java is dying! .Net is taking over!" it probably would have had 800-1000 comments. It's sad, but true.

    Having said that, I use PHP. Stop by #php on irc.openprojects.net! </plug> ;)
    • "Today was much like any other day" is an honest and concise summary of my life, and yet it leads to frequent mundane conversations with my parents, who think I am secretive. The fact is, an article that says "x and y have their place" simply isn't news, just like you wouldn't post a story "cold fusion not discovered today" or "freebsd not hacked today."

      I also disagree with your thread acitivity. This story would no doubt get more responses if it wasn't posted late in the evening.

      -a
  • I think a lot of IT Departments haven't dialed into what a website really is yet. They view a website as a large monolithic application.

    Management is trying to apply the tools of application design to web design (and by design I mean the structure/function of it -- not the eye candy). Management is also trying to reduce the toolkit design down to one integrated package. Of course, it is also very much in the interest of the large software companies to promote that same concept... fufill all your needs from us, etc., etc. To me, reduced to its simplest, a website is nothing more than navigation scheme for a large information space. That information is plugged in through a large number of essentially descrete applications. As long as the front end of the site looks the same, it doesn't matter how that content is being handled on the backend. I read a paper a long time ago where the author argues that the seperation of the interface from the content was one of the misunderstood strengths of web delivered content. That since virtually any backend application could be plugged into the interface, it could effectively break the monopoly that venders have on IT shops. Oracle gets to be to expensive? Port your data to another DB and change the ODBC drivers and say adios to 'em. For now the lure of the monolithic approach has traction with IT managers used to that approach. It will cost them in flexibility down the road. Just like the big iron mainframe folks had to adopt to the world of client-server networked PCs, the client-server folks are going to have to adapt to the logic of web delivered apps IMO.

    • They view a website as a large monolithic application.

      Applications haven't been "monolithic" for a long time. MVC had it's origins in application design, and anything decent these days is designed with the same 3-tier to n-tier approach that a web site would have.

      It's all in the economics - you have to be able to update one part of the application without the changes propagating throughout the whole application.

      • Applications haven't been "monolithic" for a long time.

        I agree 100% However, now try telling an IT manager that the intranet they're developing isn't a monolithic application. ;-)

        In fact your comment, "It's all in the economics - you have to be able to update one part of the application without the changes propagating throughout the whole application" is exactly what I was trying to get across. In the old client-server model when you changed an application its interface went with it. Because the interface and the content delivery were so tightly bound together changing the application meant the interface, out of necessaity, changed also. So all of the training and interoperability issues reared their head.

        With web-based delivery that isn't the case. Designed properly, the interface and content of a web site are segregated from each other. Designed properly, you can switch out the backend without the user ever even noticing. Or, you can redesign the front end look and feel without ever having to touch the backend apps. Rhe people who keep mushing content and interface together in one entity are going to have maintenance problems, the shops that don't are going to spend much less time spinning the wheels corrected self-inflicted wounds.

        Web delivery is a deceptively different model.

    • Don't kid yourself.

      Management views the website, with its browser interface, as little more than a modern face on the old IBM mainframe application with its 3270-terminal interface.

      The 3270 was a page-mode text terminal that let the app define fields the user filled in or checked off and then click a 'submit' key to send the form's contents back to the mainframe. Sound familiar?

      That the back end now may consist of apps or components spread across several boxes, vs different apps and components in the same big box, isn't that huge a difference. (Just because the apps may have run on the same mainframe doesn't mean the whole thing was monolithic from an application sense.)
      • Funnily, it sounds very familiar. Perhaps that's because one of my jobs is to convert TN3270 applications (written in Taskmate) to use apache and mod_perl.

        It ain't pretty.
  • ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces, while J2EE continues to enjoy its sweet spot for server-side applications."

    So its just business as usual?
  • Their software is way overpriced. And it's not like they provide support to make up for it. Every time I've had to deal with their support people, they're incredibly braindead.

    I'm actually starting to evaluate Eclipse as a replacement for Weblogic Server (BEA's software) across our organization. Should save something like $17k per installation. Anyone have any experience using Eclipse?

    -Todd

    • Isn't eclipse an IDE that is competing with Forte?

      As far as I know, JBoss and Jonas are the free, open-source J2EE appservers competing with BEA. May be you meant one of them.

      • Possibly. Like I said, I've only started evaluating options. I was pointed at Eclipse, and a quick look at it looked like it might be both an app server and an IDE.

        Thanks for the pointers however. More work, more fun. More acclaim when I save us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

        -Todd

    • Re:BEA is a joke (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't know which eclipse you're talking about, but if it's the same one at eclipse.org, the site states teh following:

      The Eclipse Project is an open source software development project dedicated to providing a robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, industry platform for the development of highly integrated tools. It is composed of three subprojects, Platform, JDT - Java development tools, and PDE - Plug-in development environment. The success of the Eclipse Platform depends on how well it enables a wide range of tool builders to build best of breed integrated tools. But the real vision of eclipse as an industry platform is only realized if these tools from different tool builders can be combined together by users to suit their unique requirements, in ways that the tool builders never even imagined. The mission of the Eclipse Project is to adapt and evolve the Eclipse Platform and associated tools to meet the needs of the tool building community and its users, so that the vision of eclipse as an industry platform is realized

      Eclipse is not an app server. It's a development environment with lots of pluggable features. I'm no expert on eclipse, but eclipse uses a different model for GUI development. Rather than use swing, which prefers to have a consistent cross platform look, eclipse wrote their own native libraries and wrapped java around it. This way you get very nice GUI with more low level control. for example, things like fonts and panes are handled differently and require memory management. If you create a particular gui widget, you have to free it up once your done.

    • Re:BEA is a joke (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RevAaron ( 125240 )
      I'm afraid I don't follow you. Eclipse is an IDE. Like JBuilder or NetBeans, not an application server. Sure, you could build web applications from scratch or using a more primitive product using Eclipse or any other IDE or editor, but Eclipse doesn't replace Weblogic Server any more than emacs.

      Maybe the support people don't follow you either, because you don't have a handle on what you're talking about? Maybe it seems overpriced because you're buying a web app server to do the job of an editor? Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but just some ideas.
    • I see others have pointed out the IDE (Eclipse) != App Server. The integration can confuse folks, however. IBM is spending big bucks to make Webshphere Studio -- Eclipse with WAS debugger and build integration their main development tool.

      Anyhow, I've found that IBM will cost you just as much.... except you get something that is much rougher around the edges. Want EJB 2 support? IBM should be out with their first cut in another month or so. BEA went gold within a month of the spec coming out last November. My benchmarks showed it is not even close to a fair fight with the current v4 or beta5 vs BEA.

      Solid EJB containers cost real money. Oracle is getting cheaper -- just starting to work with it. Sun looks like they are giving one away for free, but not sure how solid that one is. JBoss gets pretty high praises from those in developement.

      Low cost IDE's for doing EJB work are the bane of Enterprise Java Bean developemnt. You end up spending big bucks 2K+ for an IDE like JBuilder, or you get something that works for only one App server. If JBoss expands the eclipse tool the same way IBM did, it will be a nice kit.

  • write twice, debug everywhere * (new releases +license update + security gaffes) * ms_reboot_multiplier

  • Uses (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @01:11AM (#4003445) Journal
    (begin list of real-world uses for web services)









    (end list)
    • i don't know what it is about the ppl that post here. maybe you've got your own little world mastered (be it perl, C kernel hacking or whatever) but you think you are experts on everything. ...kinda weird.

      anyways, i'm doing some web-services stuff at work using M$ MapPoint mapping (web-) services (http://mappoint.net). there are a few kinks to work out but it seems to be a good fit. we're pretty much a java, j2ee (webLogic) shop.

      if you've done any geo-coding it's a pain to get all the data on cds, load it into some database, slap some sort of server on top of it (3rd party or in house), etc... it's a lot easier to just call a web service.
      • (* anyways, i'm doing some web-services stuff at work using M$ MapPoint mapping *)

        I have not seen anything there that could not be done with HTTP get or post parameters (zipcode=12345&storename=buzzwords_R_us, etc.) and returning XML, comma-delimited lists, or a map image URL.

        Here is a odd example on that site:

        "As an example, let's say you are a waste removal company and you have uploaded the locations of all your dumpsters to the MapPoint .NET service. Along with each record, you have uploaded the pick-up schedule for each dumpster. You can now perform a proximity query to find out which dumpsters in your northeast territory need to be emptied next Wednesday. MapPoint .NET makes it easy to request a map of these returned POI."

        Sounds like a bit more than a "map" service to me. It is MS trying to host *other* biz functions also (such as scheduling) it sounds like. Just another way for MS to get into your pants........pocket.
    • oh come on - there are great real world uses for web services. for one, UDDI, WSDL and SOAP are three more acronyms that make any resume look cooler!
      • There are lots of great real world uses for web services. Do any sort of integration work. Hey, I have a web front end for ordering that needs to talk to my ERP instance on the back end to check inventory before I confirm an order. Do I

        a) Code something in some language that does the lookup usually via some proprietary adapter or
        b) Use UDDI to lookup the WSDL. Create SOAP call to do the lookup. Now if I ever change my web front end, hey, I've got something that works no matter what web server I use as long as is it can do SOAP calls.

        All this web services stuff is standard based and reduces vendor lock in. I don't know what all the resistance is to it. Anything that easily lets Apache talk to SAP talk to Siebel talk to by RDMS talk to my logistics system is OK with me.
    • Let's see, I frequently use web based calendars, email, discussion forums, etc.

      I use Livejournal, which has both a web based front end and a Web-API based one (which I prefer posting from).

      I've communicated from a Windows based middle-tier to a tomcat web server using SOAP.

      There's an awful lot of places that having web services is/will be handy.
    • And nobody could ever have a use for a computer in their home. Just ask the founder of DEC.

      Those who find uses will get rich on them. Those that don't will whine about why the world changed out from under them.
    • Well, I built a product configurator service (think Dell's build-to-order configuration of computers) for a (very) large computer manufacturer that exposed its functionality as a web service. There were at least five applications downstream including a couple of web front-ends in Windows/ASP that used these services and were all written by other teams in other divisions. There would have been no easier way for us to integrate this many applications on a common configuration engine without web services.

      I'm convinced that web services is a better way of doing things when you need to integrate coarse-grained components on different platforms.

    • Web services are a great idea for intra-company stuff. If you've got some application that everybody needs to use on the same data that doesn't work well in text (say, a project management program), you could either write a GUI for each platform and a protocol for connecting to the server for shared state, or you could have an internal web server running the service, skip both of these steps, and just code behavior.

      For a lot of things, I agree that web services don't make sense on the open internet; there are a whole lot of things that ought to be static pages that get done with jsps (see shop.usps.com, for example).

      I think the real test for whether something should be a web service is whether the users all want to interact with each other. If so, it makes a lot of sense to have a web service. If people are just doing their own thing and don't want to interact, web services don't make a lot of sense.
  • Unless I missed something huge here, the comment: ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces, while J2EE continues to enjoy its sweet spot for server-side applications" in no way represents BEA giving ground to Microsoft.

    BEA makes money by selling WebLogic, which is an environment for developing server-side apps. He seems to really be saying, "Look, Microsoft, you go mess around with programmed user interfaces, because server-side development is our turf."

    Openly defying Microsoft doesn't usually work, but clever companies have managed to stay out of Microsoft's sights by promising to play well with Microsoft and stay in their niche.

    • Dietzen's comment is aimed at his customers and investors, not at Microsoft. He's simply saying "I hereby concede everything that doesn't matter to us", in a rather pathetic and transparent attempt to stake out a space within which BEA can still matter.

      The fact that he's coming out and making such a statement so early in the .NET lifecycle is presumably an indication that BEA is under big pressure from customers and/or investors to come up with a coherent story of where BEA will fit into the brave new .NET.

      I'm not sure that laying your head down dog-like on the ground and exposing your jugular to Microsoft is really the way to stay in business, though. BEA may think Microsoft doesn't have a sweet spot on the server, but that's a bit like the old joke about dinosaurs: it's OK, dinosaurs won't eat you, they're herbivores. Yeah, but do the dinosaurs know that? I don't think Microsoft knows it's not supposed to have a sweet spot on servers, and Dietzen's position isn't going to make a whit of difference to Microsoft.

      • ... a rather pathetic and transparent attempt to stake out a space within which BEA can still matter.

        Do you mean to imply that BEA is scared with good reason, or that they're scared for no good reason? I guess what I really want to know is whether you feel BEA is weak, or J2EE is weak, or both?

        I'm not sure that BEA is exposing its jugular, but I definitely agree that playing the "we can all get along" game with MS usually leads to catastrophic meltdown. Only a few software companies can truly say that they've been able to successfully partner with MS without being chomped on hard. But using the McNeally approach isn't always successful either.

        It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"

        • I don't really know how good BEA's reason to be scared is, I was really just saying that Dietzen's statement seems to demonstrate that they're scared, or perhaps in denial.

          The problem with Dietzen's statement is that it's not really plausible - he's saying that BEA's OK because Microsoft won't find a sweet spot in the application server space. The obvious problem with this is that Microsoft will certainly find a sweet spot in that space, it's just a matter of time. So Dietzen's statement, instead of showing why BEA has a future, actually calls its future into question. He's drawing attention to their weakness, which seems like a questionable strategy. Of course, the weakness is fairly obvious, but if that's the best defense he can come up with, then man, BEA's toast!!

          I'm not saying it's inevitable that BEA will be trampled by Microsoft, but a comment like Dietzen's seems pretty revealing as to what he thinks of their prospects.

          It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"

          I agree - as a software developer, I've run into this issue personally. It's a big reason I focus heavily on free software, where appropriate, and recommend it to my clients, many of whom have been burned by Microsoft's shifts in direction, lack of standards, and lack of openness. In a sense, Microsoft has been one the best motivating factors for free software. I doubt, for example, that IBM would be doing so much free software if it weren't for Microsoft.

          In a way, BEA is actually caught between Microsoft and free software. Open source J2EE servers are pretty much in their infancy, but the problem for BEA is that the "intellectual property" inherent in today's application servers is really not that difficult to duplicate. So you get free servers like JBoss, and cheap servers (with source) like Resin. I doubt many BEA clients are quite ready to jump ship today, but over time, the standardization and network effects of free & open solutions can become quite compelling. I don't think time is on BEA's side...

  • slash dotted ! I did it ! the very first one to kill the sys-con beast "Initiating server query ... Looking up IP address for domain: www.sys-con.com The IP address for the domain is: 207.178.67.98 Connecting to the server on standard HTTP port: 80 The port is closed, so our connection attempt was refused. Query complete."
  • Can't get to the damn article, so rather than talk about what Scott Deitzen said, I'll talk about what I do know. There's a lot of confusion about web services and most of it is marketing BS. Web services the technology, language, and framework isn't BS. Loosely, it an attempt to move away from tightly integrated systems. What does that mean? To me that means rather than have clients and servers all designed specifically to use a limited set of protocols, applications are designed to see each other as services. where a traditional client server application like point of service connects several dumb terminals to a central server using a proprietary protocol, web services defines standard ways for discovering and using services. A service is defined by WSDL (web services description language) which defines the server, port and message structure. when two applications need to talk to each other, they look at each other's WSDL to figure out how to transform a message into a desired binary format.

    IBM has been steadily putting lots of good code and ideas about how to approach web service. Having read through most of the white papers on microsoft's site and worked a little on .NET application which uses SOAP and WSDL, microsoft's model is not ready for prime time. IBM recently release a Web Services Innvocation framework and web services toolkit.

    there are also other efforts like castor, which are designed with web services model. IBM has a protocol called Web Services Flow Language, which borrows ideas and techniques from pi calculus. Web services as a technology will mature, but not at the rate microsoft claims or in the way microsoft thinks.

    • Here is an article that is more balanced and realistic about web services.

    • MS Model not ready for primetime? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Otis_INF ( 130595 ) on Saturday August 03, 2002 @04:41AM (#4003856) Homepage
      LOL :)

      And why's that? WSDL isn't MS proprietry language, it's a standard defined by many companies, and should be used with UDDI, currently in v2.0. .NET is a framework which IS ready for primetime, because it offers all the functionality needed to build mission critical applications which have to serve thousands of users.

      So, f00zbll, show me the beef where .NET falls short when it comes to delivering what's promised.

      ps: I develop a lot of .NET software, I know what I'm talking about.

  • Cornering the Autocoding Market [slashdot.org] .net is just the setup.

    Some info on Autocoding [google.com]

  • j2ee and .net stuff (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fedor ( 598123 )
    I still don't understand the real advantages of this kind of stuff. Honestly I've tried to understand the whole j2ee stuff, and I still can't. I haven't tried .NET and I will never try it, because all the books about it with titles containing words like 'Enterprise', 'Solution', 'Deploying' and 'Integrated' just make me sick.

    Big companies just try to sell something 'good' for software development. The problem is, that they sell it to suits who just believe the marketing crap of sales people. Most of the time there are no technical people involved in these decisions and people like us just have to work with it, because 'it's good', 'scalable', 'integrated', blkahblahblah...

    I really hope all this crap is over in a couple of years, and we can just use whatever we want to use and know is good. Getting experienced in using progamming languages and tools is the only way to see if things work. My experience is that in projects where they used stuff like J2EE, SOAP and COM, a lot of people where involved (a lot of suits) and the projects last long....over 2 years for a simple web based application!!! Arrgrhgh!! I've seen a lot of those projects and nobody overthere knew how to query a database using SQL how to use TCP-sockets, or what's the HTTP-protocol all about...They laughed at me because I did not want to use Visual Age for Java and I used javac and vi instead. "In Visual Age I cannot not see on which line parse errors occur" was my answer, when they asked what was better about just using the command line. I had to explain the word 'parser'.....

    People on these kind of big projects just had a one week course and some experience with Excel macro's. And who sells those courses....???


    I think, it's all corrupt...

    fedor
    • The problem is, that they sell it to suits who just believe the marketing crap of sales people......I've seen a lot of those projects and nobody overthere knew how to query a database using SQL how to use TCP-sockets, or what's the HTTP-protocol all about...They laughed at me because I did not want to use Visual Age for Java and I used javac and vi instead.

      Agreed. It is mostly snake-oil. Everybody is looking for the silver bullet to avoid having to learn things like SQL and HTTP. The problem is that in the end you end up having to fight the "magic" IDE and goofy API's to get what you *really* need the hard way.

      It is all just a big glass of whine: Delays the innevitable, but makes the innevitable worse when it comes.

      The 80/20 [1] rule is a universal fact of life in IT. Perhaps someday somebody will discover the magic IDE/tool/API that gives both, but until then one should learn to avoid the BS.

      [1] The 80/20 rule is that tools that speed up the first 80 percent of the project tend to slow the last 20 percent to a crawl because they don't provide the granularity of control that you need.
  • How does Microsoft (or anybody else) expect major corporations to run mission-critical stuff over lines provided by ISPs who routinely oversubscribe their boxes and undersubscribe their bandwidth?

    I can't reliably get my Usenet newsfeed without "Connection unexpectedly closed by server" messages.

    Anybody think you can run General Motors or any bank on that basis? Anybody think any ASP isn't just going to be an ISP with a new acronym?

    In a way, until the phone companies get us that infinite bandwidth they were promising a couple years ago, this is good because it will probably kill Microsoft when it becomes apparent that none of this will work for reasons entirely outside the issue of which programming language or object broker is used.

  • As someone who doesn't have much of an idea as to why webservices are needed (I've read the articles and looked at some examples) because I often just think that the whole idea of web services is like a minutarised packaged version of the ASP boom and flop a few years ago and that there are definitely other ways to do this. To me it seems as if the programming side is as much a marketing push by IBM,MS and others to generate more business than a real innovation.

    To me the idea of webservices seems to be the ability for a client of some kind (could also be a server type of client) to send a stateful request for info to a server of some kind. Since developers have been working around the Browser's lack of state for years and non browser applications can use a myriad of protocols etc to communicate to their server, such as XML-RPC,RMI,CORBA or whatever.

    Turning SOAP and UDDI into a universal standard is nice but can anybody tell me why companies trying to sell web services are any different from companies that tried to make a living (and flopped) with the ASP thing a few years back?
  • ...is that BEA will produce an application server for both environments, and would hate to see their development costs go down the tubes by actually having one of them win.
  • there is some truth to the 'write once, test everywhere' complaint against Java.

    So how is .NET's "write once, run only on Windows" any better?

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