Production Web Services

6 Comments

• Amazon's web service is an example of a production web service? Come on... I am talking about a central app for the business, a way of doing business, not something for developers to play with.
  
  
  
  Think outside the box Jesse. I am trying to stir people to think a little bit. Don't have such a knee-jerk reaction. Look at whats going on. The other apps you quote look like web apps not WS apps at first glance (the one you built). Maybe I missed something at quick glance. I am talking about Web Services, not a Web app.
  

• Also read what I said (key words capatalized) without having such a knee-jerk reaction:
  
  "reatly out of whack with the rhetoric issuing from that small software company in the Pacific Northwest. I DO see WS as the TRUE hetergenous replacement for DCOM, Corba and RMI and proprietary solutions of this form but I guess I don't see a lot of this happening UNTIL the ongoing work to recreate the middle tier services that WS replaces emerges (security, transactions, etc)."
  

• I know of at least one very large corp. here in town that migrated all their online sales to use the eBay web services (didn't mention those ones, but amazon/ebay are basically the same type of store, so the services are parallel). Doing this makes the ebay webservices very central to what they are doing. I would be shocked if the same didn't apply for some corps using webservices to integrate with amazon and salesforce as a central part of what they are doing (and, who says web services must play a central role in what you are be doing? They are simply services, they can play a minor role in your business and still be very valueble).
  
  
  
  The Articulate app is not a just a web app. Yes, there is one very large portion of it (the portal) which is a web app and also houses the web services; however, the webservices themselves are consumed by a windows app that runs on the customer's desktop (a VB / non .NET application). Additionally, we are building webservices for integration with third parties that want to tie into the system (yes, and this is at the request of customers, not just because some devs thought it was a good idea).
  

• Read what Mike G said "I think Sam's right: despite a few high-profile implementations (just as there will be with any cutting-edge technologies), most companies aren't ready to go down this road yet."
  
  
  
  I am looking at the large trend, in general. I think you can safely say, other than a few big cases, most people have not gone down this road yet, contrary to the huge hype otherwise. I don't just parrot what Microsoft tells me. I look at what the industry is actually doing.
  
  
  
  I stand corrected on the Articulate app as I only took a very quick look. Don't get me wrong. This is great. I want your app to suceed. I want WS to succeed. I went to the first two of 3 Chris Sells WS devcons. I tried to push and pull. A lot of people are just not buying. I run into a lot of fustrated consultants and developers (inclusing some that deliver WS tools) that say similar things.
  
  
  
  

• I definately agree that a lot of people just don't get it. My sister's husband works for IBM's global services division and he rarely works on any projects that use webservices. It's been almost a year since I discussed the issue with him, but he had the same view that a lot of people just didn't see what was so great about them. We have another company based here in town that is very large and has tons of integration issues to deal with. However, their management read in an article somewhere that webservices are insecure, so they are not allowed to even install .NET, let alone use webservices for their operations. So, I can definately see where you are coming from, but I think that there are a lot of real world use cases still (many of them internal projects though, like people doing system integration), even if the big SOA push has yet to arrive.
  

• Okay, great. This is good, we need to get more of these types of discussion going.