I am not now, nor have I ever been, a fan of Web Services.
There. That's for the record. Now I can to go on. It's been bugging
me for a long time, the gut feeling that something was kind of wrong
with the whole thing. With each passing day, I become more convinced of
it. Lately I've started digging in a bit, more out of a morbid curiosity
than anything. My bias has been toward more organic technologies
like Jini and Jxta and spaces approaches. The Web Services thing just seems so overly acronymed and hyped, with
unsubstantiated claims like component composability. I for one am not
buying it, and I needed to state as much.
I'm now in my ninth year at Sun Microsystems...longer by quite a bit
than any other company I've worked for...and I intend to stay with
Sun as long as they'll let me preach God's word, as it were. But
even Sun has taken the bait when it comes to Web Services, and try
as I might, I can't seem to turn that big ship once it gets moving.
I doubt any one person could. So, alas, I find I must simply state
my misgivings once and for all here, let it go, and move on.
So....I feel better now. Now I can stop feeling so frustrated
and continue the mission. Tomorrow I leave for Tokyo, another
in a long list of
Sun Tech Days, which I'm still proud to serve. I'll smile
and nod during discussions of Web Services, which is most of the
time these days. But at least when I evangelize in earnest, I can
speak of Jxta and Jini and spaces computing. Because that's the
future that will work, as far as I'm concerned. Web Services will
one day be forced into a more organic model...in the mean time,
the industry takes yet another giant leap into the unknown which
will result in pain. Alas....this too shall pass.
In the mean time, a new friend of mine and I are conspiring
to change with world with spaces. Bernard Angerer, who lives in NYC, found me via
this web site. His disseration was grounded in spaces technology,
and as such, we've found considerable common ground though a flurry
of recent email exchanges. We've decided to change the world with
spaces....not sure exactly how we're going to do it.
But we've decided. That's the most important part.
And another friend of mine from NYC is finishing his dissertation
at CUNY this spring. Igor Maslov is contributing new knowledge
in the genetic algorithm world, which he'll one day unleash
in a spaces environment, I'm sure. And it will be thus that the
world will truly be changed. Organically. One day we'll
take a step into a new age of software development - from
the hunter-gatherer age to the agricultural age. And crops will
grow from fields well tilled. That's the hope I harbor, which
has nothing at all to do with Web Services.
One day soon, I'll publish a paper I've been working on entitled
"the ninth fallacy," which speaks to the weaknesses in Web
Services, to some extent. One day...all these things will be so.
Not today. But one day. And so I live in hope.
If
there's hope for humanity it's in software