Necessary but not Sufficient  

The current buzz around web services is implying that they will solve all the problems of computer science and world hunger. I take a slightly less a comprehensive view of the impact and the application of web services. First they are in many ways an evolutionary technology, which is significantly helping their adoption. Like the evolutionary path of humans there are many twists and turns and not necessarily a common ancestor that everyone agrees on. One possible evolutionary path is through CORBA and the other is through REST and XML over HTTP. The current set of web services standards (defacto and actual) appear to cover the most of the last 20 years of computer science. This reflects well on the basic underpinnings as the ability of HTTP and XML to be molded into the wide range of standards that are presented at W3C

posted by John McDowall | 4:13 PM