Updated: 2/24/2004; 9:40:19 AM.
Andy Roberts' Radio Weblog
        

Friday, January 16, 2004

Syndicating Application Services and RSS - things to come...

Bowstreet has people using the Factory to syndicate applications as web services into other companies' web sites.  The idea behind this is pretty straight forward.  Since you can't get everyone to come to your web site to use your service, then you have to find a way to embed your service inside lots of other people's sites.  The problem with doing this in a practical manner is that you quickly find that every site has different requirements for form and function of the service, and so you have to find a way to mass customize the service, not just syndicate it.  Since the Factory is designed to "morph" the composition of a service on the fly, to fit the profiles of any number of "syndicatees", it's ideal to use the Factory as a basis to syndicate mass customized web services, as SOAP, portlets, HTML, whatever.  Now on to something new...

There's something I've been thinking about lately, and that's marrying the RSS feed/aggregator mechanism with application services, specifically around service changes.  Let's say that you've syndicated a highly customized web service into a 1000 sites, and now you want to inform the site owners that there's a change to the service that might interest some of the syndicatees, causing them to want to present or use the service slightly differently.  For example, suppose that you want to tell everyone that there's a promotional rate on a hotel - if it's a hotel booking service.  Rather than blast out emails to all the syndicatees, you could just update an RSS feed that describes the change.  The idea is to use RSS to capture metadata about the service, specifically, changes to the service.  When syndicatees found out about the change to the service, they might choose whether or not to pass this change in rate on to their users.

One could use the RSS event module as a basis to get started at defining an application services RSS module for businesss services.  It would describe changes to an application services, much in the same way that RSS is used today to describe a blog site and the last date it was updated.

Imagine a world where a set of RSS feeds and aggregators could process information about services that are being syndicated.  This meta-services layer could propagate changes about service from a syndicator out to its syndicatee, and in turn, out to a set of users.

More to come on this subject...


10:41:24 AM    comment []

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