RE: [Communicator-user] GCSI and web services ? What do you think ?

[Cristi U. <c....@sh...>]

Sam,

I am sure that my proposal for Web services into GSSI is very early and
all I wanted to do is to start a discussion around this subject that
will be benefic for us. For me at list it was. I am very glad that GCSI
has a good design that in my views still calls for Web Service support.
:))

Now I do realize that perhaps is still early for something like this and
to finish this subject I would like to say a few things that in my view
are a bit different than what you said.

> Consider, for instance, the "flavor of the month" problem in remote
> service models. First it was CORBA, then RMI, then JINI or JavaBeans
> or whatever the hell it was at that point, now it's .NET and JAX.

On a first view Web Services are not very different than CORBA, DCOM,
RMI, RPC, etc. In fact they are the same thing in terms of
functionality. 
The novelty here is that they bring into light a neutral standard. All
the previous tries were customized protocols and products that were
fighting against each other for supremacy. Now the specs are neutral and
they have been embraced by the big players. All they have to do now is
to start producing implementations for it. To me is just like when the
WEB (HTML/HTTP) started. Netscape and MS produced implementations for
them and the browsers war started. Now we are talking about the war
between .NET and JAX and perhaps other implementations. This is the clue
to me that make me think that this time they got it right and Web
Services will be the next BIG thing that every body was expecting.

It is true that SOAP over HTTP is not very reliable but it's a good
start for the moment. I remember when credit card transaction over the
Internet begun. It wasn't very safe :)) (you know what I mean) but
things improved. I heard that the plans for the future stipulate that
HTTP will be discarded and SOAP will take over. Of course that security
will never disappear, as well as the firewall issue. They have always
been there and we have to live with them but they shouldn't stay in our
way.
 
> The XML issue is another hot button for me, unfortunately. XML has
> at least two serious disadvantages as an on-the-wire transport: first,
> it's way too verbose, and second, it has no real datatypes besides
> "string".

The first disadvantage you present here can bee seen as an advantage if
we are talking about DEBUGGING. Too verbose means that it facilitate
human debugging but this comes to the price of being slow and taking
some bandwidth. The last things will improve because it's a hardware
problem. 
The same has been said about Java and it's still around today making the
developer's life more comfortable.

The second one has been overcome with the arrival of XSD or XML Schema
maintained by W3C. Web Services couldn't happen without agreeing on a
standard that regulates the small details that make life so painful
like: (what is the length of an Integer, or what is the encoding of a
String). It's being done. Now you can encode any data type with XSD.
There is a standard agreement and the big players started to implement
it. It's a very important aspect for the future.

> Next, there's the issue of whether the notion of "Web services" makes
> any sense at all. At the moment, we're already facing a crisis on the
> Net about profit-making; people want information, but they aren't
> willing to pay for it, at least given the current payment models. I
> personally would be happy to pay five cents per article view in a lot
> of places, but there's no established system of micropayments that
> seems to be both workable and acceptable from a human-factors
> standpoint. So how are Web services going to be successful? Why would
> people stand up a service? I doubt that it would cost any less than
> standing up information. In other words, I'm not sure the underlying
> business model has a whole lot of validity.

I agree with you. I would like to be able to work in an environment
based on micro payments that guarantee high quality information or
services. That will happen in a not very distant future.

The first to take advantage of the arrival of the Web Services would be
the B2B (Business 2 business) sector. They would be able to exchange
good services based not on micro payment of course :)) Improving B2B
will result in an improvement of B2C. After taking this step the focus
will be on directly improving B2C through means of micro payments.

> So let's say, on the other hand, that a researcher wants to stand up a
> Web service for free. This is certainly not out of the question. But
> first, it has to address the issue I raised earlier, namely, why a
> researcher would tolerate relying on someone else's code on a machine
> he/she doesn't have control over. For me and people in my lab, it's a
> last resort, especially given the plummeting cost of hardware. But
> let's say someone wants to interact in that way. Why use JAX or .NET?
> What are the advantages? You list some.

Well as you spotted a disadvantage of web services will be the fact that

"no one will tolerate relying on someone else's code on a machine
he/she doesn't have control over". But to me this sounds like an immense
pressure for that ONE because ONE is forced to learn lots of things in
order to be able to cope with minor/major problems. It is just like
learning to repair everything in a house hold. Instead of relying on
specialized services ONE would try to apply a DIY "strategy". 

The way they are right now, Web Services are not suited for Real time
tasks. A dialogue system can bee seen as a Real time system because the
user cannot wait forever to carry on a dialogue. This is why I say that
my proposal is too early and somehow not suited yet. However from this
discussion it emerged to me very clearly that for researchers, Web
Services are a real bless. They will really facilitate the
interoperability between sites.

In my domain there are groups of researchers doing very well one task
and doing very badly some other tasks. For example in a NLP system one
would need to carry a POS (part of speech) operation. To me this should
be a Web Service accessible worldwide. GOOGLE already took this step
with its GOOGLE API (http://www.google.com/apis/) offering NLP
applications a nice and powerful IR system. :))

Things started to move and first time I heard about Web Services I've
dismissed them as just another CORBA. When I started to read more about
them it revealed to me that they are not as they appeared to be. 

Thank you very much for taking time to read this.

cristi