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Tuesday, February 12, 2002 |
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SOAP's work/reward ratio
Kevin Altis is collecting WSDL verifiers and SOAP endpoint invokers. "Quite frankly," he says, "using SOAP and WSDL feels like work."
That's partly due to the tools-and-interop situation, which as Kevin notes, is rapidly improving. Mainly, though, it just is a lot of work to deploy all this machinery in order to call yet another stock-quote or celsius-to-fahrenheit gizmo that returns one lonely little value swaddled in layers of XML. It's not just tools-and-interop holding back the flood of interesting services that we all envision. What makes services interesting is data that's interesting. Some creators/gatherers of interesting data will wrap high-quality APIs around it just for fun. But for others, maybe most others, it'll have to be a business.
6:20:39 PM 
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Adam Bosworth: Toward an XML programming language
An XML Programming Language?
From Adam Bosworth's current End Tag column, for XML Mag:
"We need a language that can natively support XML as a data type and yet can gracefully integrate with the world of objects (Java or otherwise) and can take advantage of the self-describing nature of XML by supporting querying of its own variables. This language as used by humans will look like a programming language, not an XML grammar."
I'm not sure what such a thing would look like. But I'm inclined to agree with Adam that XSLT, though usable and useful, ain't it.
3:21:08 PM
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Monetizing web services
Monetizing Web services
Sam Ruby shares a script that massages Google's news page. "Be forewarned," says Sam, "that as this is based on HTML scraping it could break if google were to change it's layout."
This reminded me that Google used to support the syntax:
http://google.com/xml?q=wsdl
Now, of course, that request 403's and refers you to the Terms of Service page. For a long time, I've thought that Amazon and now Google ought to offer, and monetize, programmatic access to their info. Why not? Return small/infrequently-requested XML datasets for free, and larger/oft-requested XML datasets for a fee.
2:46:53 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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