Re: Article: Fat protocols slow Web services

> On Thursday 10 January 2002 12:55 pm, Kurt Cagle wrote:
> > I find your comments about offloading some of the work to the client
> > interesting, because it synchs with what I'm seeing elsewhere - the
> > pendulum is beginning to shift back to the fat client
>
> Eventually, it must... especially as mobile ip and other such things
> begin to take off.
I've felt much the same about mobile ip for a while. I think one the reason
the WAP initiative failed is because the technology advanced a lot faster
than the standard did. I suspect that this may also end up being the
Achilles Heel of the strong server-oriented Web Services applications; even
the "off-browsers" such as Mozilla and Konquerer are becoming increasingly
powerful (The KDE Konquerer team just announced that they were now
supporting Microsoft ActiveX Controls, which adds an interesting twist to
the whole browser game, and may represent another lease on life for the
Linux desktop). A Web Services stack (perhaps even one written using XSLT to
keep it very generic) could easily be implemented on even a fairly modest
handheld PC, making that system act like a small server. Indeed, it occurs
to me that what could be a very cool application would be a redirect service
that could be notified when such a remote service on a wireless network logs
in, setting a URL to the IP address from a DHCP call.  It's surprising what
you can do with a portable server.

> > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-wsxl/),


> Ouch. That's given me a lot to digest. I'm not sure how much time I
> can dedicate to this...
>
> The system I built about 10 years ago (buried somewhere inside NEC)
> allowed UI's and application logic to be downloaded to the client, the
> shared state was updated through peer-to-peer interaction.

It's pretty hairy, but much of the WSXL description is pretty much common
sense. It's just that there hasn't been a huge amount of that of late in the
Web Services sector.

Received on Thursday, 10 January 2002 20:04:31 UTC