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by Dave Bettin.
Original Post: Show me the angle brackets
Feed Title: Dave Bettin on Services
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Feed Description: Bettin' on .Net Service Development
Steve Maine provides a nice descriptive summary of Don Box's DevCon talk. He also describes how inevitably these specs will be hidden from users and just work; Whether that abstraction be through tooling, well designed programming models, or both.. only time will tell.
Steve also uses DCOM as an example on how developers were successful in enabling DCOM to solve problems while not really understanding the guts of the protocol, a path a lot of "service" people want to travel down. While this notion is good it can only take you so far when developing with distributed systems. There are times when you absolutely must know what is happening under the covers and you must be able to comprehend these details.
There are a lot reasons why the Web has been huge hit with the developer crowd. But, IMHO, the main "success" factor in developing for the web is that of visibility. The core specs of the Web (HTTP, HTML, CSS) are all there ready to be uncovered. Countless of times I leveraged the visibility of the Web to troubleshoot problems, learned how to create new problems, and gain invaluable insight, all because the "guts" of the Web were there ready to be digested. It is a very important aspect of the web that must utilized in the WS-* world.
Therefore, I think it is imperative that WS-* vendors engender visibility of the specs at the protocol level (a binary infoset.. yuck) and simplified exposure of the specs at the programming model level. Trust me, you will be very relieved when you have to troubleshoot a interop problem with a Google service in five years.