The ever-insightful Jeremy Allaire offers his views on "holistic Web services."
...I've continued to be annoyed by the narrow-minded thinking that has dominated discussions of web services to date. Like many IT technologies, the central thrust of the web services worldview has emerged from the classic middleware infrastructure providers, which has in turn colored our thinking on web services significantly. The essential problem is that web services as defined by a core collection of XML protocols (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) focuses almost entirely on API-level application integration, rather than a broader view of how software will be created, distributed and consumed in the future.
Jeremy goes on to discuss the relationship between Web services and Application Service Providers (ASPs) in addition to "the missing pieces" in ASPs vision.
He concludes, "let's turn the debate around and focus again on the broader vision of software as service rather then keep ourselves down in the plumbing....."
Amen. This is the exact notion I had in mind when I wrote "Flash MX and the Bigger Picture: Lightweight Internet Applications".
[UPDATE: Just catching up on my reading I found that Jeremy also has posted an equally as insightful piece on "The Problem of Scale" that is also worth a read.]
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