Scott Beaudreau blogs about Mobile Web Services (and my thoughts on this topic)
Scott Beaudreau, an Architectural Consultant with Microsoft, has just started a blog about mobile web services. It is just great to have a window looking into what Microsoft has been up to with the cutting edge mobile web services!
I personally have a strong interest in mobile web services. I published an article on smart client-based mobile web service almost two years ago. Looking back, some of the statements are rather immature -- but I know better now. After that, I published a series of technical articles on this topic based on J2ME/kSOAP, J2ME Web Services spec and .Net CF. (Check out my Vanity Amazon Status MIDlet for a real world app). I also published an IEEE article on the security issues of mobile web services in financial services sector. My consulting work with Nokia has lead me to investigate another whole area of mobile web services discussed in Scott's essay -- Web services interfaces to telecomm services. The Nokia Series 40 blueprint application I developed deal with the Nokia MMS servers. I hope to expand it to presence and other services in the future.
Now after reading Scott's blog entry, I am increasingly convinced that the future of mobile web services is messaging based infrastructure with multimodal support:
1. A device should be able to send a SOAP request as an asynchronous message;
2. The request message is authenticated and authorized at an AC;
3. It is processed by multiple intermediaries and finally forwarded to an end point;
4. The end point processes the request and sends another request to the telecomm service center;
5. The telecomm service center then delivers the results in MMS or voice to the client device.
That is a very appealing end-to-end picture.