Re: [DotGNU]RE:Defining Webservices

[Bill Lance]

--- David Nicol <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bill Lance wrote:
> > 
> 
> 
> Whatever it is, it could be defined in terms of
> method access,
> so I take Bill Lance's comment as in support of
> mine.
> 
> Also, we've gotten quite off the topic of "defining
webservices"


Not really.  So far, WebServices seems to mean a very
broad range of standards mediated networked
communication.  All of them are formated data
exchanges.  Some of these exchanges are formated as a
method access or a RPC, or some such similar format. 
Some of them are formated as dynamically generated htm
pages.  In the Mapquest example, the discussion was
that their existing, wab paged based presentation is
also a WebService.

But different stackes of standards are used for
different kinds of things, http, stmp, ftp, as well as
SOAP, XML-RPC, etc.  And we are about honing different
tools for different approaches.  Some are ASP kinds of
things, talking directly to an end user with a
browser.  MapQest for example.  Or the Yahoo mail I'm
using for this project.  Some are more directed at
application to application communication, like XML, or
specific subsets, like RSS used for news blurbs and
agregating sites like Meerkat.  Some others focus on
internal networks, like J2EE.  

Then we get to the more recent and nebulous consumer
things like Hailstorm.

Calling all of these things WebServices might very
well be justified, cause they are in a very real
sense.  But the media and PR hype is clouding useful
meanings.  But we need useful meanings in order to
design and build the tools.

Perhaps this is something that we can't approach top
down, envisioning the overarching paradigm, then
refining the parts.  Perhaps we can't do this because
that vision becomes to quickly distorted by profit and
politics.

Maybe coming up from the bottom is necessary, taking a
real problem and solving it, like the SourceForge
substitute idea.  Or the ID system.  Then building the
system organically from what works .....

just a thought.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals
http://personals.yahoo.com