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

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

> Are the specs neutral? I can't find any evidence on the Web that the
> .NET CLR has been submitted to any standards body (it certainly
> doesn't help that Microsoft keeps choosing names for things, like .NET
> and C#, which include punctuation which Google strips off).

CLR (Common Language Runtime) with MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate
Language) from .NET is Microsoft's response to Sun's JVM (Java Virtual
Machine) and its bytecode language. It is part of .NET which is one of
the "instances" of Web Services. Another Web Service instance or
implementation is JAX provided by Sun. It is just like the WEB browsers
situation a long time ago. 

Web Services are under the "control" of W3C. They resulted as a unified
effort from all the major players. The Web Services specs
(http://www.w3c.org/2002/ws) relay mostly on 3 major XML languages:

WSDL (http://www.w3c.org/TR/wsdl) - describes a Web Service interface in
machine readable form.

XSD or XML Schema (http://www.w3c.org/XML/Schema) - describe any kind of
data type that would be passed between WS. 

SOAP (http://www.w3c.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-part0-20011217) - describes
RPC in XML.

I wrote all the thighs above just to state that it appears to be the
most neutral situation in the history of RPC solutions. This is very
good because it kills the stupid rivalry between various standards that
prevented things from happening at a real BIG scale. 

> Submitting Web services as standards is a real risky
> proposition for these companies: on the one hand, they can't really
> take off unless there's true distributed access to them, which means
> other platforms and other vendors, but the loss of control implied
> there also calls into question what the business model might be.

Well this is why thighs are really exciting here. :)) It's really a race
and rivalry between implementations and not between standards. This is
very good and healthy. All those implementations will coexist finally.
Of course that there is always the danger that one implementation will
try to modify the standards so it can take advantage (like MS did with
its web browser)... but let's hope this time won't be as bad as before.
:))

> I do take your point here; I'm just not sure I agree. I think CORBA
> reall does count as a non-neutral specification; there are open-source
> implementations of it for a number of languages, and if I recall
> correctly, the Java runtime now comes with an ORB. And it's not clear
> that there's anything wrong with CORBA, technically, except for the
> judgment I've frequently heard that it's too heavyweight a
> protocol. That is, it's not clear to me that the battle has changed
> substantially; but I can't really judge this well.

Perhaps CORBA is the most neutral solution that existed so far. It was
supported only by a group of the big players and I think it is a living
example of what rivalry can do to a good solution.  

Web Services in essence are common SEMANTICS (SOAP, WSDL, XSD) over a
common SYNTAX (XML) and they have the implicit/explicit support of all
major players. It's a really remarkable fact that has a big potential. 
 
> How do you make a speech
> recognizer sensitive to context? Do you just swap the language model,
> or is there something more sophisticated you can do? 

Do you mean real time language detection? We are hopping to work with
recognizers that are able to detect the language as you speak...but they
are prototypes I guess. 

> Furthermore, the apparent advantage of not needing to support a
> service you don't know much about vanishes in real research
> circumstances. Let's say I wrote a parser which wasn't perfect, and
you
> needed some help. But I'm running it as a service, and you don't have
> the source code. And there are twenty other groups ALSO subscribing to
> my service, and they're having problems as well. Do you really want to
> wait for me to get around to paying attention to you, or would you
> prefer the option of rolling up your sleeves and trying to fix the
> problem yourself?

The answer is that with your example, perhaps not. I would try to solve
the problem by myself :))

But with the Google example, there is not too much hope to get it to run
locally. Personally, I would trust Google for support with their IR
system as a web service. The API they offered is like a toy for small
developers to show what it can do, to show the potential.

I am sure Google already plans B2B with the big portals and commercial
sites and it will do it through Web Services.

> Or let's say there's an enhancement you'd like to
> see installed, because of some complex set of dialogues you're
> exploring. In other words, I think it's far more likely that
> researchers are going to WANT to have other people's code and run it
> locally, rather than rely on the apparent simplicity of subscribing to
> a remote service.

Sam,

It looks like there are examples where you are right and people would
want to get their hand dirty even if it's not their job and there are
examples where I am right. One can have both things happening on his
site. Getting the code to run on one's local machines is something that
happens today and it's not very difficult to be done. The problem
becomes more difficult when it comes to accessing remote services. There
seems to be a solution to this one in the not distant future and I
personally wandered if this can be exploited in future by GCSI.

> I realize I'm stating my case awfully strongly here. If the AMITIES
> folks really have firewall issues and distributed interaction
> requirements that the GCSI doesn't address, we need to talk about that
> (offline, of course). But as long as this is an abstract issue, I'm
> going to try to stick to my guns.

I didn't start this discussion because of some firewall issue we have
here or because of some distribute requirements that we have on AMITIES.
Apart from multilingual support (that was very rapidly solved by you
guys, thank you very much again) there is no other real and strong
requirement for us from GCSI. It works very well and I am happy with it
the way it is right now. For the moment you won this friendly debate.
:))

I was trying to look in the near future, I've combined Web Services
specs with the GCSI distributed design, I got excited :)) and I wrote
the first e-mail to the GCSI user discussion group hopping to get some
opinions. I received plenty of them from you and I thank you very much
for taking time to read and to answer. 

Cheers a lot for this comprehensive and pleasant, for me at list,
discussion I had with you.

cristi