Academia gets creative with Web services

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Maybe, but can't ZDNet cut the hyper pro-MS stance?

"These creative uses of Web services...stand in stark contrast to the more mundane, workaday uses of Web services"

Helping me catching a bus is "creative"? How? What is it about web services that make them uniquely suited to this assignment that couldn't be handled by some other protocol or messaging infrastructure?

"Microsoft's primary customer: the information worker "

Rubbish. Microsoft's primary customer is corporations, not workers! Or do they really get the majority of their $9 billion per quarter from "information workers"?

"iCampus is another effort by Microsoft to expand its presence in the academic community, where future professional software programmers are trained. In an ongoing competition to gain market share against Java tools providers and open-source software, Microsoft is trying to make access to its Web services development tools simpler for students and faculty."

Ah, some truth in reporting - it's actually a marketing effort. No problem, but why not lead with the real reason, not this junk about how MS is making campus life wonderful through web services?

As for bus tracking, I saw a web-based, real-time vehicle tracking system 10 years ago (there are probably 50 on the market now). It used HTML to transmit co-ordinates to a browser and a plugin to display position on a map. So someone at MIT worked out how to use XML instead. - gee, that must have taken a full 5 minutes. Kudos to the MIT folk if they did it from first principles, but hardly an earth shattering piece of research.

My favourite is:

"Web services may be an important link in realizing the vision of broad access to information originally promised by the Web browser "

Broad access to information was delivered (not just promised) by the Internet and WWW. The browser offered an OS independent platform to create an application and user interface, based on HTML and internet protocols. MS realised this was a threat to their plans for domination did its damnedest to ensure that there is no other OS or browser than theirs. They even broke the law to do it.

Web services are essentially a way to acce ss data using an XML-based messaging protocol. XML was used originally because by appearing to be XML, it tunnels through most firewalls. The same effect could be produced by a zillion other methods of publishing and using text-based interfaces (e.g. cgi). Can we please cut the hype now?

Posted by: Fred Fredrickson   Posted on: 10/27/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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