Thursday, July 17, 2003|
Web Services: Buzzword or programming tool? The Web Services panel here at AlwaysOn was more lively and entertaining than the preceding morning sessions. Ray Lane, freed from the need to defend anyone's interests, plied the needle skillfully and was helped along by some rather sophisticated heckling in the bigscreen chat window. The remarks can be roughly separated into three threads, representing the semantic heat death that is engulfing the Web Services term:
I'll punt the first issue, defer the second until after the (explicitly) Open Source panel, and address the third: Web Services in the integration standards sense is indeed a step ahead. We can quit fighting about fun issues like big- vs. little-end binary over the net, and just accept the overhead of squashing everything into marked up character streams. Cool, the world marches on. I can parse XML for arguments and metadata, instead of reading raw binary or ASCII armor. But anyone thinking this really solves a deep standards problem is kidding themselves. We've getting a nice new surface syntax that takes away much of the ugliness of defining and late-binding interfaces across a network. The real work is - as always - in defining the semantics of the interface, and getting others to play the game your way. And the latter is just a new battleground for the platform wars. Behold, today's battle.
Amazon's external web services aside, my intelligence says the overwhelming use of Web Services standards today is within the firewall. It's mostly used for covering and integrating legacy apps. With the general hold on new enterprise software initiatives, there's not a lot of 'native' app building. So keep an eye on that open networked web services future, but right now, this looks like a programming tools market. |
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The ultimate in Always On
Give it a try. (Thanks Stefan.) |
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Oxley-Sarbanes and the reduction to the banal So here's Eric Benhamou, chairman of Palm, 3Com, and PalmSource. An articulate speaker with a breadth of Valley experience, piloting companies that are locked in mortal combat in some of the most interesting segments of high tech. Maybe it's just my cynical and jaded tastes, but I just heard him give a mobile devices talk in which there wasn't a single point I didn't already know, or that anyone couldn't know through light filter feeding from mobile technology sites. Plus some platitudes on innovation that evoke a serious case of deja vu, and two slides on Palm that reflect months old press releases.
It's not the poor guy's fault. As he briefly mentioned at the start, he's in the focus of the new spotlight on exec's disclosure created by the Oxley-Sarbanes act. As the chairman of companies whose stocks have had serious come-downs, I'm sure he's more worried about lurking class-action attorneys than the odd blogger. But I'm missing the old days when CEOs would joyfully slag each other on stage at venues like the West Coast Computer Faire or Comdex. So, Tony, my first bit of peanut gallery advice is to get some private company guys who can and will mix it up a bit. |
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Blogging from the AlwaysOn conference Today I'm be attending Tony Perkins' AlwaysOn on a blogger's pass. (There's an innovation right there.) I'm toting laptop, digicam, and a concealed-carry snarkgun. We'll see what results.
(Sorry for the silence the last few days. Punching a hole in the schedule for things like this just pushes real work to one side or the other....) |
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Spam: Occasionally I agree with the EU The EU is about to launch an opt-in model anti-spam regulation. This contrasts with the US, which seems to be staggering toward an opt-out model of some sort, under the influence of direct marketers and technology vendors (I'm ashamed to say), which produces a few problems of implementing the regulations in a global Internet. You won't usually find me a fan of transnational 'laws', but here's one case where the US government could score some points with both its own constituents, and its international peers by doing the right thing: legislating an opt-in regime. Mind you, I've no illusion that it's going to stop the problem. There are plenty of spam reflectors and virtual evil-doers beyond the writ of either EU or US, and one suspects that IP-seeking JDAMs might be taken amiss there. But it will help, and we need all the help we can get now. Full and annoyingly repeated disclosure: We have a portfolio company in the anti-spam market.
Via Edupage |
