Good day everyone. Here's Don MacVittie with his final installment, direct to you from the O'Reilly conference in Santa Clara.
Well, today was the wrap-up for this year's conference. It's been fun and informative, and hopefully I'll be back next year.
Today I focused on SOAP and Web Services. To the extent that this was possible, I was successful.
There was a presentation by Adam Gross and Bill Robbins about Web Services. This presentation was pretty good, discussing how web services are being used. I was amazed to see the number of business people and "Hybrids" or "sellouts" (presenter's terms when counting) there. They outnumbered IT and AppDev people by about 2 to 1.
This says something about the direction our industry is headed. Anyway, the presenters compared the use of web services to the componentization of the stereo. They also made a very valid point that true B2B is not yet ready for political reasons. Businesses that are in partnership tend to be tightly coupled due to the trust factor.
Next in the Web Services arena was Rohit Kare, discussing SOAP Routing. He made a very good case for Web Services to model the network. By treating separate Web Services as modifiers or steps in a network routing chain, parts can be added and deleted without modifying the original service.
His best example was bank accounts - when you're in Europe, you insert a converter to show your money in Euros. This can be done (assuming a common communications protocol despite some company's attempts to make them different) without modifying the original Web Services that report your bank account information. By the same token, security, transaction processing and reliability can be inserted.
I then went to a moderated panel discussion of SOAP vs. REST. It was interesting, but these were obviously points that the panelists had argued before, and they were comfortable with it. In the end, I think that the crowd left with smiles from listening to quotes like "You'd better use SOAP because you don't know where this message has been." Regardless, there?s a firm belief that SOAP has carved out a niche. Unless something fundamentally inadequate appears in SOAP, REST will not be considered as a viable standard.
That was what I planned for the day, and it was all very entertaining and interesting. I was also thrust face-to-face with some tough realities about the future of the Internet. The afternoon Keynote was a panel discussion with an introduction by Larry Lessig. The topic was "The Future of Ideas", and it made you stop and think. Larry is a lawyer that has an interest in the Internet, and information dissemination. He's a powerful speaker, and if you look at all of the things he spoke about taken together, we have a mission.
We, the technology providers of the world must stop supporting the myth of the black-and-white world where either everything on the Internet (or computers) should be free or everything not free must be proprietary. We need to start talking to politicians about sane solutions to proprietary information rights, copyrights, and software rights. Laws are being made concerning our livelihood, and we're not providing nearly enough input. Declaring an end to copyrights is not reasonable, but neither is the copyright of the last 20 years reasonable. We need to start helping politicians understand the hard truths, and get them working towards viable solutions. I've never read any of Larry's books, but I'm going to now.
And finally, I spoke with Lisa Rein, and Architect for the newly formed Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization aimed at helping creators of content - Video, Audio, and whatever - determine what rights they wish to grant the public, and how they can manage their rights. This is one of those "sane" solutions that might help keep the Internet free while keeping it from being lawless. I got a copy of the press release announcing the creation of Creative Commons, but unfortunately I was in another session during the press reception.
As fun as this conference has been, I sensed a strong undercurrent that people are concerned about the direction legal proceedings are taking technology. I've felt those reservations but not done anything about it. Today made me realize that someone must do something, and that someone must be technical.
I'll leave you with the suggestion the panel had for "what can we do?" Write a letter, or write a check. Write a letter to your senators and congressman, or make a check out to someone like the EFF or Creative Commons.
Now I get to pack to go see my family! See you here again next year!
Don.
