Web Services

Loosely can be defined as web content delivered to an AppServer which processes it further, rather than just a browser which renders.

In the Real World, see Ways I've Integrated With Business Partners.

Key scenario I'd like to see: if I build a vertical productivity app, there's a way for me to integrate into Yahoo's horizontal PIM apps (calendar, address book, etc.), so I don't have to build those (and so user sees lots of stuff integrated into one place).

Though maybe that less a web services issue than a synchronization ecology... (what's the difference?)

Some key Open Standards:

• HTTP

• XML

• MIME

• XmlRpc, ReST, SOAP

• WSDL (or is this a BigCo mess?)

  • alternative WSDL-s http://hinchcliffe.org/archive/2005/05/10/215.aspx (for SOAP and ReST)

• UBL business language (could save thinking about NameSpace details even for non-XML apps) http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/14/UBL10

List of public Web Services.

Wiki-based list

Ways I've Integrated With Business Partners

May17'2005 at Info World SOA "executive briefing"

(Heh mainly came to meet Jon Udell f2f.)

Most of the speakers are vendors. "You need a service management layer to make things manageable."

Here's my other-extreme thought Of The Day: taking the recent discussion of MicroFormat-s and putting Structured Data into documents via XHTML tags/attributes, what if you didn't even deliver responses to Web Services requests as XML, but as XHTML that could just as easily being given to a browser, you just don't use the CSS to paint it on a page? (Probably a bad idea because with at-all-complicated data model, the XHTML won't be structured like layers of data structures, but rather as little tables that don't relate to each other. Still...)

I'm a little skeptical as to whether specific semantics are consistent even across groups within a single BigCo, much less across borders. Ergo the attitude that stuff like WSDL eliminates human conversation seems ridiculous to me.

But I do agree there's a big issue of failure/exception handling, esp when trying to call multiple thinly-related services from a single user action. One big question might be whether that needs to all happen synchronously, or whether maybe some bits happen synchronously, and others are pushed out as messages which don't need a confirmation (that goes back to the user).

John Halamka of Care-Group sounds like John Lithgow.