Why am I hearing so much about soap,and so LITTLE about Java? <G>
Red Herring: "Microsoft got a surprising plug from former competitor Marc Andreessen, who spent the afternoon calling media outlets to announce that his new software-services company, Loudcloud, was 'adopting the whole Microsoft stack, from top to bottom.'"
Dave Winer:
To which I say, I wish we had gotten together on this when Netscape was strong. If only Netscape had embraced this vision, in 1998, we'd be further along now. Today it would be better if Marc would lend his good name today to a process that includes Microsoft, but doesn't revolve around them.
In response to Marc's claim, there is no Microsoft stack. I'm pretty sure most of the "media outlets" understand this. Now understand how superficial the hype is. Good net standards involve opportunism, for sure, but they also require patience and balance, consideration of other points of view, and participation. Andreessen is a newbie here.
What is Dot-Net?
Pushing aside the statements of intent, what did Microsoft actually announce on Thursday?
I know what it is, but it's hard to explain if you don't have the prerequisite background. Let me try to explain by filling in the blanks. This column is written for non-technologists, so I have to start at the beginning.
Inside every computer there's a constant chatter of program modules asking other modules questions and getting back answers. Every mouse click launches thousands of these software conversations. Like any conversation, the conversants must agree on a language. If I don't know Italian, I can't understand much of what an Italian says. That's cool, sometimes ignorance is bliss. But I digress.
We call these modules "procedures". When one procedure asks a question of another procedure it's said to "call" it.
Now of course when we connect computers over a network all we're doing is making it possible for a procedure on one machine to call a procedure on another machine. These are called Remote Procedure Calls, or RPCs for short.
Until May it mattered very much which language each piece of software was written in, or what operating system it ran on. Java, Windows, Macintosh, they all talked different languages, so like an American in Italy, they could connect at some level (the Web) but to have a sophisticated conversation, there had to be a higher level agreement.
Until May the conversation between technologists was more like a playground conversation. "You have to use Java!" said Sun. Microsoft said "We like DCOM!" and everyone else kicked back and waited for something interesting to happen.
On the SOAP mail list, someone said "This is all politics!" and that's right. But that's not the same thing as saying it's pointless. SOAP, the common language we agreed to, is just enough BOGU for everyone, it's truly a miracle, because the sandbox argument was cast aside. The playground kids grew up. "We'll work together," they said. "Let's agree that this is the way procedure calls work over the Internet."
Now, in this context, what is Dot-Net?
Microsoft says "Now that we have a common language, this is what we want to talk about. Would anyone like to talk with us?"
(Hey, that's what I hear. You can choose to hear something else.)
What do they want to talk about? Membership preferences, through Passport, for example. This raises a question. Do I want to give my personal information to Microsoft? Hmmm. I don't want to do that, at least not at this time. But can I agree with Microsoft how to do this? Absolutely, no problem with that. Can I operate a Passport-compatible server? Of course. Good idea.
(Let's have minimal and understandable docs. Lots of working sample code.)
There are a bunch of other conversations they want to have, you can read about them on the Microsoft Web site. Before going in too deep and getting lost in the details, that's all there is. We have a common language. Now we're going to start talking.
Microsoft wants to talk about things that any Web technologist in 2000 would want to talk about. And of course we like talking with Microsoft because they have good technologists and lots of people use their software.
The magic of SOAP
It's worth noting, because it might otherwise be missed, that SOAP has had a magic life.
Talking with one of my Microsoft co-authors, Mohsen Al-Ghosein, last week, he said he didn't like the way SOAP turned out. This should come as no surprise to Microsoft people, because Mohsen doesn't mind sharing his opinions. With Mohsen, Don Box and Bob Atkinson, I discovered something that had been eluding me my whole career. People *could* work cross-company. I had never seen it happen. Our minds worked together, the egos took a back seat. That's why this spec works, even though it has lost some of its simplicity along the way.
But the magic continues, even if Mohsen and I find the spec difficult to follow. I gave the complexity to another brilliant man, Andre Radke, who works for me. He didn't like me for doing this to him, but Andre is a persistent man, and he got SOAP working in Frontier. Now I don't have to see the details. I just design systems and deploy them. And they work with systems written in Java and Python, and soon with those from Microsoft, and shortly from everyone else.
SOAP has Big Mo now.
That's its (new) magic. |
