Web Services considered Good July 8, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Enterprise Architecture.1 comment so far
Daniel approvingly quotes a post by Elliotte Harold about the democratic virtues of REST / HTTP vs. the Stalinist dictatorship of message-based Web Services.
I’ve been hacking a small SOAP-based web service lately and wondering why they are generally considered Good Thing? They use a complex and rigid set of protocols, require programmers to jump through seemingly unnecessary hoops and add non-trivial layers of complexity to software.
And do they deliver on the promise of component re-use? Do they make distributed software easier to develop? I don’t think so – not yet anyway.
But I’m thinking message-based Web Services may still be a Good Thing, for perhaps the same kind reason that Tito’s dictatorship over Yugoslavia could be considered a Good Thing: they enforce a strict discipline on the programmer.
Remember untyped programming languages? Remember life before interfaces and encapsulation? The main problem with software is that it is infinitely flexible. You can do too much with software – there aren’t enough constraints. I’d venture to say that all the significant advances in software engineering arose from the addition of constraints to programming discipline: Structured Programming, Modules, Typing, Object Orientedness … all these frameworks obligate the programmer to conform to a discipline and the tools built around them enforce it.
It could be that the real value in Web Services is merely as a standard mechanism for enforcing APIs for distributed software. And if the wrong technology wins (i.e. it’s Beta vs. VHS all over again), well, so be it – we’ll make better progress next time (as we did with DVDs? or did we?).
Freebase Revisited July 5, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Data Mining, Information retrieval, Open Access.2 comments
A few months ago, I noted the arrival of Freebase the “Creative Commons Database”. Since Peter is fond of analogies, I would say “Web Pages are to Wikis as Databases are to Freebase”. After a few months of waiting, I got my username / password today and got a chance to have a closer look at Freebase.
The idea is growing on me. I think Freebase strikes a nice balance between “Everything is Miscellaneous” (anarchy) and “Do It My Way” (totalitarianism). The creators of databases in this creative commons can choose and control the data-schemas but, if others don’t like it, they have the freedom to create their own data-schemas. So you have a certain anarchy – whomever can do whatever (constrained by some organizational principles) – but you end up with information that is addressable (every data element in the entire commons is guaranteed to have a unique key, for instance) and (somewhat) structured.
