Slashdot Mirror
Will 'Web Services' Take Off?
NoInfo writes: "You've heard a lot about XML, SOAP and the idea of Web services. All of which have been intriguing me a great deal lately. Sun, Big Blue, MS, Ariba and others have teamed up to create UDDI.org. The site describes a bit about their idea of companies publishing the electronic services they provide. They will also eventually let you search a registry of those businesses and their offered services, including any exposed 'Web services' they provide. With all these forces behind it, perhaps it's not even a question, but will UDDI and/or Web services 'fly'? Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services, despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?" If this lives up to its promise of platform independence, then may turn out to be something incredibly useful. Are there any readers involved in UDDI who can comment further on how things are progressing?
The above /. article is the most buzzword-compliant I've seen in weeks. I say just ignore it, and if whatever it is gets big, buy the O'Reilly book.
Are there any Slashdotters aiming to provide Web services despite its heavy backing by Microsoft?
Kinda like saying that programmers shouldn't program easy to use GUIs because MS or Apple do it that way
or the allies saying that we shouldn't incoporate jet and rocket technology because the Germans thought of it.
If its the right tool/idea for the job USE IT!
When cross-platform really means cross-platform (anyone tried to write a standalone app in Java and get it to work on all UNIXes as well as MSFT systems?)
When everyone's willing to have all their data travelling across someone else's pipe, and stored on someone else's hard drive, and trusts that the remote server won't be cracked.
In short, investments in these companies are about as likely to pay off as investments in companies supplying enabling services (goggles and scarves) for the porcine segment of the aviation market.
I'm currently setting up an online store using PHPShop (*excellent* package, BTW), which can optionally interface to an XML-based 'exposed web service' called Intershipper to calculate shipping charges.
The idea is great - a class module connects to a socket on Intershipper's server and passes XML containing the source and destination shipping addresses, number of packages, and weight of packages. Intershipper then pulls real-time shipping quotes from 7 major carriers, inc. FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, etc., and passes the quotes (again, in XML) back to the shopping cart so the shopper can choose the shipping they want.
The reality is that it is turning out to be quite problematic. Every once in a while the whole process will hose because the shopping cart can't get an answer from Intershipper's servers. I haven't determined yet whether its because their servers are down or because there is a routing problem between the two networks (My server is on 8 T3's to different providers, so I'm thinking its the former). Either way, I don't feel it's solid enough to depend on for an e-commerce application. Every time it hoses it means a lost sale and a pissed-off customer, and that's no way to do business.
It's a wonderful idea, but until it can guarantee at least 99.999% reliability, I'm switching back to flat USPS shipping rates.
I suspect we have a ways to go in terms of network and server reliability before exposed web services take off.
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This is a 2nd generation EDI (Enterprise Data Interchange). EDI is a horrible, horrible mess. UDDI is supposed to take the incredible pain and suffering that the EDI specification has caused the ERP industry and make it go away.
UDDI is not about ASPing (although it will help those companies that do that), and its not about Web applications. It's about massive ERP systems talking to each other and coordinating with minimum human intervention. Say I am IT for XYZ MegaStores Inc. My business analysts have finalized an order of 1000 ABC Electronics Thingamagics that need to be shipped thru EFG Freight. Instead of me producing a flat text file with some massive scripting and e-mailing it or otherwise transmitting it to ABC and/or EFG (or actually trying to use EDI for that), UDDI would enable me to send that data into my ERP system's UDDI module which would then take care of the communication and translation process. It's all about B2B data interchange in a big scale...
Of course, this kind of freedom should enable other things, like on-the-fly auctions, just-in-time shipping (down to the hour or minute even) and other cool little supply chain optimization wonders. Of course, that's exactly what EDI was supposed to achieve in the first place...
BTW (shameless plug follows): if you think that the above description sounded cool or are otherwise into data-warehousing and massive data-mining and other real cool tech and looking for a job in Atlanta, e-mail me.