Bill Gates and IBM Software chief Steve Mills joined together to give an update on their companies’ combined work in advancing Web services.
Gates, Mills Tout Web Services Breakthrough
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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…but I remember when MSN Messenger would allow you to connect to AIM, but then AOL blocked that, and Microsoft was all about hey, we’re trying to support “open standards” and “interoperability”. And then as soon as they got a significant share of users using their IM client, “open standards” and “interoperability” took a back seat to licensing fees. The industry has been jerked around by this company so long, I don’t know how anyone can trust anything they say, especially when they talk about open standards and interoperability. The company has never been about that, and likely never will be. They pay lip service to it when they need to, but their actions never bear any of this out. Case in point, OS/2. Since OS/2 could run Windows 3.1 and OS/2 applications, but Windows 3.1 could not run OS/2 applications, developers found it more logical to write for the the Win 3.1 API hand have it run on both platforms than write for OS/2 and have it not run on Windows. This is Microsoft’s version of “interoperability”. Let other people interoperate with us (for a fee), but not interoperate with them or their standards/protocols/APIs.
What a waste of space.
How many times are they going to keep on bleating about ‘web services’ being ‘the next big thing’ when its obvious to everyone that we have had ‘web services’ sincve the day the CGI spec was rolled out the door, and no amount of buzzword-insertion (‘oh but our web services framework uses XML so it must be the best thing since sliced bread’) will change the simple fact that ‘web services’ have been absolutely trivial to implement in practically any language you can think of since the web server became popular.
Why does Microsoft think this is hard – we’ve already gone over the ‘goal line’, all anyone wants are platform-neutral and international standards. No .NET or Passport necessary.
But Microsoft can’t provide this, instead they just go on and on about how ‘we’re not there yet’ – the only time they’ll consider that ‘we have reached the goal line’ is when everyone, everywhere runs only Microsoft.
The largest software company in the world is trying to reinvent CGI as a proprietary standard and paint this as a revolution. It’s pathetic.
I totally agree to you dude!!
i was saddened to read an article today in the technology section of a british newspaper. it was in the light of recent failures of the social services to protect children from abuse, with notable recent sad cases.
i was saddened that the article was pinning hopes on a new computer system which does everything in XML.
such an example of religious faith in a buzzword is truly tragic and reflects sadly on the mainstream media.
>> open standards
w00t! so it will run on Windows, Windows and Windows?
Yes, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows Me. It will be cross-platform!
This does sound like a significant step, although I guess they’ll have to go shopping of a standards body to ratify it, along with the “usual suspects” of software vendors signing on as cosponsors.
The fact that these two companies have pretty much driven the entire WS effort is a bit unsettling… this is becoming more of a “standards-deposited” effort than a “standards-driven” one.
anonymous-nz: think of WS as an attempt to deliver an vendor-interoperable CORBA over the web. It goes a lot further than CGI.
really? What can you implement with ‘web services’ APIs that you cannot implement with CGI?
Why would anyone trust thier critical business to Microsoft web services when there are hackers finding remote exploits in thier desktop OSes on almost a weekly basis
CGI (and servlets, ASP, etc) were originally really designed as a way to expose enterprise systems to human users sitting at a browser, as opposed to applications. You submit an HTML form to a remote web server and get back a web page or perhaps generated piece of email. A custom app could parse the returned page or email and associate the data with the original order, but that’s a messy, ad hoc technique. Then there’s the issue of transactions -in this demo, the wholesaler needs to set up a transaction so that if the dealer’s credit is no good, for example, the order would be automatically aborted. This transaction might involve call outs to foreign systems such as for credit evaluation, and again to the manufacturer’s system to get the goods. (I’m guessing here since I haven’t seen any more than this one article). Before WS this likely required manual steps and/or custom programming. Of course, sophisticated retailers like Wal-mart or Amazon can afford to set up automated systems with their business partners, but others can’t afford the custom development.
Microsoft, IBM Partner on Security Ideas
http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=4517
“Gates and IBM executive vice president Steve Mills said their companies’ three-year collaboration had developed tools that will let computers conduct secure transactions whether they run Microsoft’s Windows platform or others, such as IBM’s WebSphere or the open-source Linux system that is given away.
“We’re being as inclusive as we can,” Gates said of Microsoft’s role in the cross-platform project. “This is a fabric for someone to do e-commerce that’s independent of the operating systems that are out there.”
It will be interesting to see how far this attitude applies to Mono.
Anyone notice this comment in the article?:
(It should be noted that the backend of the demo was a Linux server running WebSphere and Windows Server 2003, and a Sharp Zaurus PDA running Linux and the Opera browser was used as one of the clients.)
Was an IBM machine running an instance of Linux, which in turn was running and emulation of Windows Server 2003?
If so, it was Linux interoperating with Linux using open standards!
I suspect they were probably using VMware or something to host both Linux and Windows on their server. VMware is very popular among professionals running demos (to simulate multiple systems) so don’t be surprised.
well, no – HTTP is a mechanism for bidirectional communication between HTTP clients and servers.
CGI simply provides a standard method for the way this data is provided to the server and client ends of the connection – when a POST request is received, the server places the body of the request on the applications STDIN, and STDOUT is mapped back to the response sent by the web browser.
In the case of a GET Request, data passed as URL-encoded HTTP request parameters are placed in environment variables befor the application is invoked.
So, given that you can pass any XML you like back and forth between the client and the server via POST requests and CGI, what is it that ‘Web Services’ APIs offer over this model again?
There is no reason a CGI app has to be limited to things like sending email, and nor is there any need to parse HTML – if the application that makes the POST request (not necessarily a browser) wants XML, its easy to send back XML instead of HTML. Send back a stream of binary data if thats what you want to do – CGI doesn’t dictate how you communicate over HTTP, it simply provides a standard for web servers and clients to operate
My point is that ‘Web Services’ APIs are so trivially implemented on top of the simple CGI standard, that it seems ludicrous that so much fuss is being made over them.
You can use CGI to return an XML document. But to get interoperability between different vendor’s offerings, you’d probably want to define an envelope element that contained standard subelements for authentication and transactions, allowed encrypted body elements, etc. Then you’d be on the same path as WS – much of the IBM/Microsoft activity has centered around defining these subelements. But you’d have something more limited – HTTP is not well suited for asynchronous messaging (think of how you would extend something like MQSeries or Java Messaging Service between enterprises or platforms). And you wouldn’t be able to support RPC between enterprises or (perhaps more plausibly) heterogeneous distributed computing platforms within an enterprise, with standards-based middleware and programming language support – that’s what SOAP/WSDL enables.
CGI in particular is limited to query string input – essentially a flat namespace that lacks the expressiveness of XML.
So you’re correct that at some level everything boils down to generic protocols like HTTP and SMTP, and XML. But the advantages of standardization don’t stop there, so people find it useful to agree on definition of higher level layers.
Hey Dave, check out the following web link it may answer some of your questions, and yes the demo was run on Linux which Billy had to sit through.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/09/18/microsoft.gates.ap/index…
Believe me I bet the geek in him wants to take a peak at the source code.
I bet one of the secret passage ways in his mansion leads him to a secret room with a computer running Linux From Scratch. (okay that was a stupid joke)
:B