| By Sean Rhody | Article Rating: |
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| October 28, 2004 12:00 AM EDT | Reads: |
22,117 |
One of the things I continually rail about in the Web services world is the lack of last mile technology - you know, the ability to get a Web service in front of a user. Even though a large number of Web services are designed solely for computer to computer communication the continuing reality is that more Web services are designed to interact directly or indirectly with human beings.
The problem, as I've stated before, is that there is no concept of user interface in Web services - no way to go that last mile and reach the end user. We've got a plethora of technologies to solve other problems, such as security or transactional integrity; sometimes we even have multiple standards for solving those problems.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know that having a transactional semantic, as complex as it sounds, is simpler than providing a generic approach to user interface. Computers have different operating systems, with different presentation constructs. Java took a shot at ubiquity of user interface with its write once/run anywhere approach, but the least common denominator approach they took with AWT and Swing left a bad taste in many people's mouths (not to mention that it left many people going to get a cup of coffee while they waited for the screen to respond). Regardless, Java failed to create a ubiquitous front end.
Ideally, we've abstracted the business rules into Web services, so all that's left for the front end is presentation logic - displaying data, acting as a data-gathering device that forwards all requests in coarse grained calls to a back end Web service.
Reality makes it a little more complex, as screen data population (think drop down list boxes, etc.) is rarely part of a pure Web services API design. So some additional Web services are usually needed for screen support.
Mix in things like validation (making sure the social Security number is nine digits, no alphabet characters), dependencies between screen controls (like filtering one drop-down based on the selection in another) and conditional displays (graying out options, or removing screen elements based on selections), and you have something that is more complex than just rendering screen elements. Then try to figure out how to do this in a neutral manner with regards to operating systems, and you have a good idea why no one has wanted to go here.
There is some hope however. Microsoft will be releasing a technology known as Avalon as part of their Longhorn release. Avalon will abstract the presentation logic into a format known as eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. Based on XML, XAML describes the presentation aspects of an application's user interface. Like HTML, it is tag based, but unlike HTML, it's designed to be implemented on a native user interface (Windows, in this case), although it can also be utilized in a browser.
At the moment, no mention has been made of placing this language in open source or making a Web services standard out of it. Let me be the first to urge that this happen. Please, donate this to the community.
It would or should not be difficult to move a language that describes a user interface to other platforms. XAML will also work in Internet Explorer and for all intents and purposes that's a separate platform. And realistically, the language describes screen elements that are nearly identical across platforms anyway - a button is a button is a button, whether it's on a Mac, a Windows machine, a Solaris box, or a Linux PC. Sure there's always the chance of incompatibilities, or dummying down, but I'd take that (in the first release, at least) in exchange for being able to describe my application without code and let the operating system figure out how to run it, and what to display.
So I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. This is a good idea. Finally, the last mile.
Published October 28, 2004 Reads 22,117
Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Sean Rhody
Sean Rhody is the founding-editor (1999) and editor-in-chief of SOA World Magazine. He is a respected industry expert on SOA and Web Services and a consultant with a leading consulting services company. Most recently, Sean served as the tech chair of SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East.
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Chris 12/08/04 01:20:49 PM EST | |||
very well constructed article i must strongly aggree with the point of introducing language into the microsoft proposed web tag |
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Steve Bailey 11/02/04 05:10:01 AM EST | |||
I agree with Sean's position as more and more applications are being assembled on a service-oriented basis. Steve Bailey |
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Alex 11/01/04 05:22:35 PM EST | |||
I think you are mixing the pears with the tomatoes. Web-Services have one focus; and that focus is to provide an alternative communications layer to RPC's (all that we have now) and to make them usefull they have to keep close to what the mean to solve. trying to include in the specification of a web-service is like trying to make the TCP/IP Layer how the data must be interpreted. The TCP/IP Layer concern is communications ONLY. So web-services concern is to provide intercommunication between one machine and another. To make a API-call available to a client that only haves a HTTP Connection to do what it needs to do. Then having a protocol to describe a front-end; like Tom (in the previous reply) said; there is HTML and DHTML. If you want Remote-Window; you have X-Windows; that haves nothing to do with microsoft. If you want a Richer forms and richer interactions; now Flash is the De-Facto statndard to do that. And there (Im sure) many other tecnologies that enable you to do what you want to do. |
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Tom Welsh 11/01/04 02:04:50 PM EST | |||
Hahahahahahahahaha! Very amusing! You did mean this article as a spoof, didn't you? Because, as everyone knows, there is already a standard way of providing end-users with a GUI link to remote applications. It is called the World Wide Web. |
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