For the second day in a row at the XML Web Services One conference here, a keynote speaker got up and signaled the impending end to the Web services era, at least on a standards level. Don Box, an architect in Microsoft Corp.’s developer division told an audience of Web services conference attendees Wednesday: “The end of the XML Web services era is near. I predict two years from now we won’t have this conference.” Read the story at eWeek.
XML Web Services: Is the End Near?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Is it because nobody is using it today, or what?
I think xml is a great idea, and have plans to implement it into cross-site ideas soon.
Or am I just smokin crack?
-Chris
Another brilliant PR move from Miscrosoft
That headline misses the point the article makes. The standards need to standardize, and stop changing (dept of redundancy dept, where are you?), so people can move on to actually implement web services based on these protocols.
PS: The story link seems to have broken in the last few minutes. Maybe they are rewording the headline
Web services may be coming to an end (thank God – sorry, I prefer application development over web dev) but that doesn’t mean XML will die off too. The headline should be re-worded to “Web Services: Is the End Near?”. I’m using XML right now in a regular application, no use of Internet connectivity. I was making my own binary file format that contains both binary data as well as text strings. It was harder to work with because of my poor design, but it was small, lightweight and fast. I’m replacing it with an XML parser backend for ease of development and future expansion. Plus it’s easier to read instead of opening my files in a hex editor. Another neat thing is since XML is just text, it can be easily compressed to save space.
It’s nice to see someone from MS admit that they’re surefire technology (COM) has limitations. There will probably come a day when XML and Web Services will seem outdated but for right now, XML is one the few things that pretty much everyone is onboard with.
I think it’s interesting that Don Box mentioned the progress that MS has made with their Web Service infrastructure (“”We can’t rev [revise] the .Net Framework fast enough to keep up with the innovation in GXA.” “). I would definitely keep an eye on that (cf, Hailstorm/Passport).
-d.
I think that this guy from MS is saying this because the company can’t get it’s act together with .NET. I think that XML is a very exiting technology that every OS should embrace.
They’ve reposted the article. The headline now says:
“XML Web Services: Means to an End”
I was right
Talk about misleading. At first I thought, what the heck? But after reading the article you figure out what they actually mean. The end of web services is near because in the future there will be applications. I guess what they mean is that people will just use applications, web services is something that is hidden from the user, just like nobody really knows when they access a COM object. At least that’s my take on it.
The reason they won’t have this conference anymore is that the standards behind XML will be old-news and more or less done. There will be no reason to talk about creating standards, like they’re doing in this conference, because the standards will be established. Makes sense to me- it’s not like the standards behind the protocols of web services are all that complex.
Nowhere did anyone say that web services will die, or that XML will go out of use.
Isn’t web services all what .Net is about?
<Isn’t web services all what .Net is about?
No.
Agree, it’s kind of a PR stunt.
Everyone who’s done any work with Web Services knows that it’s still in its infancy as Don Box said. It’s gonna take a while before they standardise on elements such as ( and most importantly ) security, transaction support, etc.
I agree with him about the conference though, in 2 years, you won’t see a XML/Web Services conference because it’ll be fully integrated into OS’s and other tools by that point. It’s all about hype !!
p.