Web Services - where are they? Web services are all the hype but I'm skeptical. Don Box, a COM god in previous life and Web Services architect today, made an interesting argument about web services during a talk at O'Reilly's conference. He made an analogy with Windows GUI programming: at the beginning programming for Windows in bare APIs was very difficult and not many people did it. The thing only took off when a higher-level tools like Delphi or Visual Basic made it much easier. His point was that the same will happen with web services: today they're too hard to write so not many people are doing them. When we build better tools for writing them they'll take off. I wonder if this is the whole story. The history proved that GUI programs where very valuable, much more than DOS programs, and that's why no-one writes DOS apps anymore. Despite being much harder to write, costumers wanted them, were willing to pay for them so programmers were willing to work on them. So the problem boils down to this: are web services valuable? Do they make possible things that were not possible? Or at least make applications that are desirable but were previously very hard to do, easier to do? I don't see much evidence for that. So far I've only seen rather trivial things like stock quotes or weather reports re-packaged in SOAP. Even recent success stories like Google or Amazon APIs are just re-packaging of existing information that you can get by parsing HTML output. Yes, that's certainly an improvement but does it justify the hype?      

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."

-- Sun Tzu