Monday, August 09, 2004

Web Services Complexity in Perspective Today, one of the engineers I work with, Eric Rajkovic , made an insightful remark on my blog against the vagaries of JAX-RPC complexity today that I thought would be useful to serve as a counterpoint to that somewhat pessimistic entry.    He noted quite often where simplicity matters is more on the Web service client rather than the Web service implementation.  He reminded me of a customer who spent a lot of time crafting his WSDL and implementation so that his .NET clients got the maximum ease of use when incorporating his service into their applications.  This is not to say development of a Web service implementation shouldn't be easy; rather to note that those doing the service implementation are often somewhat more sophisticated than those doing the consumption. This client friendly approach is a common for popular Web services - take a look at Amazon's, EBay's or Google's WSDL for their services. Frequently these and others have nicely annotated WSDLs and at the very least they have nice meaningful service, operation and parameter names in them.  Further, these highly public Web services often ship an SDK with sample clients in a variety of languages.  This is a popular approach we see in our customers.  The goal here, of course, is to ensure that your service achieves maximum usage with minimum of fuss from the end users.  If you have to pay some amount of complexity on the server to get the right namespaces, the right service names or whatever it is you need to get a WSDL that has maximum "consumptionability" that's probably not a bad thing given the number of satisfied customers you are out to achieve. This jibed with a subsequent conversation I had with another engineer today as we worked through some namespace bugs where we continued to seek out usability for the default bottom up and top down cases but correspondingly always had the crutch of the JAX-RPC mapping file to resolve those difficult to work around namespace mapping issues that defaulting or some extra command line option wasn't going to help. comment [] 10:52:34 PM

RFID and WiFi in Libraries I visited the newly upgraded Hillsdale Public Library today where they appear to have RFID for checking out books ... cool ... I think.  Information on what is going on under the covers is skimpy and there are a few minor user kinks to work out - such as dealing with magazines.  The other thing that seems to be pretty happening in local libraries these days is WiFi as a number of San Mateo libraries seem to be certifiable hot spots.   Makes The Real Time Enterprise and BPEL a little closer to home when myself and my six year old daughter are living it in our daily lives.  For some background see: - http://www.engadget.com/entry/0401742317562628/ - http://www.ci.sanmateo.ca.us/downloads/government/commissions/library/lib_min_04_05_20.pdf comment [] 9:51:28 PM