Dave Johnson

I have been intently following Dion, as you do, over at the good old SOA Blog. One recent post is, as usual, more of the same commentary about Web 2.0 and SOA.

In his latest post Dion suggests that:

“Writing software from scratch will continue going away. It’s just too easy to wire things together now. Witness the growth of truly amazing mash-ups of which things like Retrievr and Meebo are only two tiny examples.”

This is a bit too far off the Web 2.0 global SOA deep end for me. Retrievr is admitedly an interesting mash-up but is it really “truly amazing”? Is it something you need to use everyday - something to write home to Mom about? I suppose it could be considered amazing from the perspective of available mash-ups but in general mash-up quality and usefulness is relatively low. From what I can tell the main reason to provide API’s to your software is to either:
a) get more users and increase your valuation when selling your Web 2.0 company to Yahoo!
b) hope that Google likes your mash-up and hires you
c) gain the support of the increasingly trendy niche of hybrid “programmer / blogger / never the cool kid in school” types to help you achieve goals a) or b)

d) attract attention to attain status of trendy hybrid “programmer / blogger / never the cool kid in school”
(please leave any other ideas in comments below)

Flickr in itself is only marginally amazing, and it was written from scratch - shock horror!

If one even considers what a mash-up really is, one finds that we have always developed software by “wiring things together” have we not? I can imagine with every level of programming language abstraction there is some journalist somewhere who heralds it as evidence of a new golden age of programming productvity. The only difference here is that programming languages - unlike mash-ups - can actually be useful!

The real amazing software that I find myself using is that which actually *enables* the mash-ups; for example, Google or eBay have great technology and are products/services that can not simply be created by mash’ing up a few JSON based JavaScript streams in a browser.

In his latest post, Dion even says:

“Maybe software developers should just go back to sprouting acronyms and delivering software that doesn’t do what people want.”

To me, he is trying to say that Web 2.0 let’s people build good, useable software - this is sort of true and I am a big believer in AJaX of course. However, I would like to know how many social networking, tagging, blogging, sharing //insert buzz word here// Web 2.0 applications we need!

The actually point that I was thinking about when I gave this post a title was that I just don’t understand why creating REST based services is really that open, easy, or robust? At least with Web Services and WSDL one can automatically build a C# or Java proxy for a service and even have JavaScript emitted for use on the client, can you do the same for the del.icio.us REST API so easily? In fact I find it astounding that an API such as that of Flickr, which is actually quite robust, does not even have a standard WSDL based description of the bindings (addmitedly some aspects of the API are not that complicated to warrant SOAP based services but at least a binding description would be nice) - my point being that it seems to me WSDL descriptions (or any kind of machine readable one for that matter) of mash-up enabling APIs are a few and far between despite the fact that they are actually quite useful for generating proxies etc. Also, how will these supposedly simple services work with the Semantic Web? I am not sure the Semantic Web will be that easy in itself so does that mean we should forego it and just settle for Web 2.0 or maybe 1.5? Well yeah maybe we should :S I guess I could be alone in thinking that the Semantic Web is what we should really be talking about rather than mashing-up Google with Craigslist (I know, Google + Craigslist is sooooooo 2005). The whole idea of an API for a service that one has to actually physically read makes me shudder - haven’t people had enough of mapping inputs and outputs to services (whether they are REST or otherwise)??? Maybe I should quit complaining and define a REST service description language (RSDL) that is a simple version of WSDL …

I suspect this drive to simplicity is going lead us down a path we have been on before. As you make things more simple you also, generally, make them less valuable. I know that many take the KISS principle too literally sometimes and apply it to the nth degree. Sure Google is pretty damn complex but they also have billions of dollars in revenue - complex and valuable. On the other hand, look at Retrievr - simple and worthless. Choose your poison.

Del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Web2.0, XML, Service Oriented Architecture, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.