New approaches to web services.
This article points to acouple of good examples of leveraging Amazon and Google’s web srervces APIs….This other example - this time from Calin Uioreanu - shows various eCommerce offerings (in this case cameras) being aggregated together - and presented to on-line shoppers in a comprehensive fashion. This aggregated camera-shop - was created entirely based upon Amazon APIs.
Though I realize allot of this was done during the dot com hayday - that aggregation was all done - by hand (i.e. manually gluing together systems - with no underyling industry standard to leverage or utilize.)
Paul Bosch (Meg’s buddy) has also created some cool ‘aggregated’ interfaces - combining - guess what? Blogging and web services!
That’s the genius behind XML-RPC and Dave’s original reason for creating it. It frees the UI and app developer from all the ‘misha-gash’ of the backend. And for us - it’s a zig while others are zagging.
This post jarred an idea loose.
Ultimately, the promise of web services, multimedia conversations, smart aggregation, metadata, and king client apps, is to put the potential power of web scripting into the hands of the non-technical users.
Users should be able to assemble complicated networked ‘apps’, with easy to use (visual?) tools, for their own consumption, and for publishing to others. Today this is called rss aggregation and weblogging.
The standards are emerging for gathering data - the web services and sematic web standards (and heck throw in screen scraping) - and publishing data, in rss, opml, html, etc. More standards need to develop to stitch this together. A layer above scripting, encompassing all the gathering and publishing standards, in XML presumably, which can support a tool layer above that.
ebXML and all the WS-* are somewhat in this direction, but completely tied to SOAP, and years from emerging. I like Apache Cocoon, for the idea of stitching together different functionalities in a simple XML document, to create portals. We need this sort of XML instruction language for rich clients, to be used locally, for personal aggregation, and shared, for publishing.
Developers need to build so the unexpected can happen. I’ll think up some future examples. In the present, myRadio nuggets are knocking.