Clay Shirky on Web Services

Take the inches-to-millimeters example; who would willingly incur the overhead and latency of a remote HTTP call when they could simply multiply inches by 25.4 to get millimeters? These sample services illustrate that it’s difficult to create a web service that doesn’t rely on both the client and the server understanding the terms of the transaction in advance.

Both the client and the server understanding the terms of the transaction in advance. Which is why Microsoft, IBM and Sun can drum the increased ‘interop’ webservices give developers. They know, in the larger scheme of things, XML based interop is useless without standard vocabularies emerging. Microsoft’s .NET MyServices and especially BizTalk, and the Sun-supported ebXML effort are portents of the battles to come.

On another note, it is commonly noted that there is nothing that can be done through web services and SOAP/XML-RPC that can’t be done through a plain old CGI/POST combo. But that is beside the point — comparing properly implemented webservices — not stock quotes — to CGI/POSTs is like comparing a CGI app written app written in C with a servlet in Java. Sure, both do the same thing (and CGI/C is still in use), but if I have to develop a web-based transactional system, I know which one I would prefer, thank you. The key points are ease of use and maintainability — and all the other benefits that published interfaces give you.

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