RE: potential users of web services

I believe that the services you cite fit my definition of Web service
quoted below.  I could perhaps be more concise: 

A Web service is a computational service, accessible via messages of
definite, language-neutral and platform-neutral format, and which has no
special presumption that the results of the computation are used
primarily for display on a user-agent. 

Hope this works for you.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org] 
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 12:03 PM
To: Andrew Layman
Cc: www-ws@w3.org
Subject: Re: potential users of web services

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:10:46AM -0800, Andrew Layman wrote:
> The term Web service was created to contrast with two earlier
> technologies.  On the one hand, it identifies a distinction from "Web
> site" in that a Web site serves pages, typically in HTML, for display
in
> a browser to a human, while a "Web service" offers a computation
> directly to anther computer, with no special expectation that the
> computation will be used in a browser or for display to a human. Web
> services are not computer-to-human but computer-to-computer.

Well, if it's the HTML that you're concerned about, why not return some
XML or RDF via HTTP GET?  That's machine processable.  And any piece of
software can invoke HTTP GET on a URI, no human required.

What about this?  http://www.xmlhack.com/rss10.php

It's an RSS feed for xmlhack.com.  No "getXmlhackRss()", just
"GET /rss10.php".  It's also not easily human parseable.

I don't know why that's any less a Web service than getStockQuote().

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Monday, 8 April 2002 15:29:21 UTC