Lazycoder

Web Services – all about messages

There have been a couple of postings in the past few days over at Codebetter.com that have really crystalized something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Brendan Tompkins : Web Service Thinking – Thoughts on Steve’s thoughts on Sahil’s thoughts…

WebServices – A WHOLE new way of thinking

If you are a typical fat client developer. Go read these now. If you’ve been a web developer for quite some time now, you don’t need to. You might enjoy them, but you don’t need to know that it’s all about the message because you’ve known that all along. That’s what you’ve been doing all along. But instead of passing messages between two distinct domains, you’re passing them between pages or even back into the same page. Either in the Form collection of whatever web framework (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI) you’re using or in the querystring.

For the past few months I’ve been watching the hype behind SOA build and build and I haven’t “gotten” why it was all necessary. Now I do, I grok web services, because my whole development world (minus when I first started out) has been about messages. It’s just that no one was calling them messages, it was just “what you did to pass information between pages”. ASP.NET tried to abstract some of the messaging with their fancy Viewstate and data binding, but it’s still all there. Lurking just beneath a thin veneer of syntactical sugar. AJAX is putting messaging back at the forefront.

BTW have you ever noticed that most posts about WS and SOA are mostly about telling other people that they don’t really “get it”.