Getting psyched for XML/Web Serivces One tomorrow! I expect to see folks like Sam, Keith, Don, and many others. I won't be there during the first part of the day, alas, but expect to show up to register in time for the panel discussion at 5:30.
My take on the "Breakthrough or Myth" question? Some of each, I think. There is a lot of power in standards which everyone can agree on, but really, that doesn't hugely matter unless the world is ready for a particular kind of technology. I think that the combination of technical (I can buy a powerful machine for a few hundred bucks at most, including a v.90 modem) and social (my grandmother knows what email is; you can't look at a billboard or watch TV these days without seeing URLs) forces has provided a fertile environment which is finally ready to support the kind of distributed computing ecosystem that the DCE / CORBA / DCOM -heads have dreamt of for decades. Combine that with the mostly vendor-neutral and fairly ubiquitous technologies in the XML family, plus a dash or two of web architectural concepts, and by george you might have something there.
Bottom line, I don't believe that Web Services will "spell the end of packaged software as we know it", and the basic concepts of distributed computing on which they are based certainly aren't new, but I think there's something real under all the hype. It's up to us to see how that evolves. Me, I'm psyched - I wouldn't be working on this stuff if I wasn't. :) There are a lot of problems which still need solving, and we have to figure out how to solve them in an environment of intense "coopetition", but heck, there are some smart people thinking about all this. I'm curious to see how the conversation goes tomorrow.
Anyway, bedtime for me. Hope to chat with you if you'll be at the show!
1:59:35 AM
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