Web Services: The Next IT Revolution?, which I co-wrote with three other MIT students for a course in eBusiness at Sloan, is now available on-line. We discuss the basic technical architecture of the IBM/Microsoft model of web services (as well as the current implementation practices), privacy and security impacts for individuals and organizations, the effects that web services will have on the software industry and on consumers, and how we think people will make money on web services.
If you aren’t familiar with the technology, you’ll probably be hearing more about it soon–it’s the paradigm behind Microsoft‘s .NET, Passport, and Hailstorm.
If you’re really familiar with the space already, you’ll probably find lots of places where we’ve made mistakes or consciously excluded things. One of the things that we consciously excluded was implementations that don’t follow the Microsoft and IBM model, including XML-RPC. Originally we wanted to include a balanced comparison of the different approaches, but realized we were limited on both time and space. In partial compensation, the website points to a couple of really good discussions of alternatives to the SOAP/UDDI/WSDL implementation approach.
My co-writers, Adam Brady-Myerov, Buddhika Kottahachchi, and Wenona Charles, have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this project and have had some really valuable things to say. It’s been a real pleasure working with them.
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