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> > To me, one of the more perplexing things about this "web > > services" buzz is that it seems so retrograde. Network services > > have indeed been possible (on at least UNIX :) for decades > > now, and it isn't clear to me that SOAP is much of a change > > except maybe with respect to marketing (and technical > > details that are, in the big picture, minor). > > No, I see diffrerence: > traditional network service solved technical tasks, not related to > business. (file systems access, routing, etc) not related to business > process of enterprise [may be one exception: LDAP] I think the people who solved business process problems using RPC systems would disagree with what you said. OS developers solved OS problems. Application developers (by and large, ones inside mid-to-large size enterprises -- the only ones who'd really bought into distributed applications) solved different problems, including business ones. Those solutions weren't as visible. > web services are in the next layer: they solve business tasks, like > order processing, customer information retryeving, etc. As I said, retro: people have been doing those with RPC systems for decades. That is, when they haven't been building them straight on top of databases ... anyone with middleware-style requirements was very likely to use an RPC framework to build their "services". The sea-change the "web" brought was a cross-platform GUI, based on HTML. How the back-ends talk to each other has often been either an RPC-ish thing or a messaging framework; the "web services" buzz doesn't seem to change that in any fundamental way. - Dave
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