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XML Web Services: Means to an End 27

Posted by michael from the not-over-until-the-closing-tag-sings dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For the second day in a row at the XML Web Services One conference here, a keynote speaker got up and signaled the impending end to the Web services era, at least on a standards level. Don Box, an architect in Microsoft Corp.'s developer division told an audience of Web services conference attendees Wednesday: 'The end of the XML Web services era is near. I predict two years from now we won't have this conference.'"
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XML Web Services: Means to an End More

XML Web Services: Means to an End

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  • More precisely... (Score:5, Informative)

    by __aaanwh8370 ( 67651 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @07:58AM (#4169125)
    He says that the era of producing the standards is coming to an end, not the usage of the services himself...

    to quote:

    Box said XML Web services are a means to an end. "We have to get the plumbing sorted out," he said. "We have a couple more years of plumbing work, but after that we move on to applications," he said. Box said the "protocol work is starting to wind down, the infrastructure is catching up with protocols and it's time to start thinking about applications."

  • and...? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (sound of crickets chirping)
  • Sometimes I guess it's not worth the effort to write up an actual article description and it's easier to just plagiarize the article itself...

    But I digress.

    The web services model looks like the Application Service Provider model of yesteryear. MS isn't stupid, but sometimes they are pointed in the wrong direction. The future isn't in remote computation (like Ellison's been trying to push since forever), but in more powerful personal computers and more computational power in every device and the technology to tie them all together. It's going to stop being the software makers that dictate the progress of technology and go back into the hardware makers' hands.

    And who stands to benefit? Consulting shops that specialize in device integration.

  • Thinking about applications (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Whinger ( 255233 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @08:03AM (#4169161) Homepage
    "protocol work is starting to wind down, the infrastructure is catching up with protocols and it's time to start thinking about applications."

    This quote sums up Web Services for me. The infrastructure/concept is okay ... but suitable applications aren't that obvious ... or maybe I've missed the point.

    A relative works for MS (partly promoting Web Services) and keeps telling me that we should consider creating Web Service applications and/or converting existing applications to Web Services. My standard answer is that we can't afford to run Microsoft products on remote servers, both practically and financially. But of course the real reason is that I don't want to ;). Why change what already works?
    • Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you need to do some more research on this issue. You don't have to run Microsoft products on remote servers in order to access web services running on local ones. The whole point of this initiative is interoperability, and using XML and SOAP to have a common way of running remote applications. That means that you can invoke and use your web service from any other language that supports these specifications. In that way, it's better than DCOM not just because it works through firewalls, but also because it allows standards other than COM to govern the app communication.

      I'm also glad someone else noticed that the article isn't really predicting the end of web services, but rather the fact that it will be a fixed standard a few years from now, and developers won't even be thinking about it when they write their applications to run over the Internet. It's kind of like not having to have HTTP conventions these days, not that I'm aware of those ever happening before :)

  • I didn't know it ever started (Score:3, Insightful)

    by msuzio ( 3104 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @08:10AM (#4169200) Homepage
    So, what they're saying is, they're giving up on the hype, because apparently none of us are falling for it?

    OK, bring on the next over-hyped technology. I'll just keep developing Web apps the same way I always have :-). Good old hand-rolled MVC style models
    still seem pretty solid to me :-).

  • Read between the lines... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kiaser Zohsay ( 20134 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @08:16AM (#4169223)
    Is he predicting the end of web services, or the end of useless conferences?

  • Creating Apps Now (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The people who have to get disparate systems to speak are doing this now, sometimes without the aid of these standards.

    To get single sign on to work for just one entity (one company) and tie applications hosted sometimes remotely, sometimes on the same box you have to start now, or you will be forever patching systems together in myriad different ways and protocols. XML does work.

    How much do the SOAP standards and current XML parsers help when it comes to security? to formalizing a standard set of data types? to encapsulating query type data for different systems? not much...

    I have found that using parsers from companies supposedly "moving awfully fast" in this arena is perilous at best, and at worst, simply impossible because they don't parse.

    XML/SOAP is here to stay, and gaining ground as far as covering the necessary topics, but the business of getting work done will go on without the benefit of the standards.

  • I agree, web services is over (Score:4, Informative)

    by tzanger ( 1575 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @08:35AM (#4169308) Homepage

    XWT [xwt.org] is the way to go these days. OS-agnostic, clear and simple separation of UI and business logic and totally, wholly extensible. I love this software.

  • My Favorite Quote (Score:4, Funny)

    by Euphonious Coward ( 189818 ) on Friday August 30, 2002 @12:35PM (#4171144)
    My favorite bit is
    Box also said UDDI is the technology of the future, but that may change in 2003.
    Toadying has always paid well.

  • Forgive me, but isn't calling Web Services an "era" rather overstating their importance? Certain parties, not only MS, have been pushing this idea for a few years now, but it's never really caught on, and for a very good reason: much of the development world has no use for them, gains no benefit from them, and so couldn't care less about them.

    One might reasonably argue that the use of COM-related technologies was an "era" in the Microsoft development world, since they gained reasonably widespread usage in the industry and lasted a while. And yet now, as MS pushes their latest and greatest, we have former COM proponents such as Don Box coming out and saying (not just in this article, but all over the place) that COM was never really any good. I think that makes it quite clear how important, or otherwise, "keynote" speeches by Microsoft spin doctors -- and the subjects they discuss -- really are.

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