Tim Oren on web services and its flavors

Over the past six months, I've had the distinct pleasure of discussing the variations on web services with Tim Oren.  My part in the process was asking the obvious questions, and his was to provide the analytic thinking.  He's done a great job distilling hours of (his) thought and conversation into one great post.

Tim Oren's Due Diligence: REST for the Rest of Us? The Great Web Services Divide

... When looking at a web services related venture, make sure that the technical approach and jargon line up with the claimed business goals. If the venture needs to reach a broad user or developer audience, REST and other lightweight approaches are appropriate. If the goal is reliability and integrity, the WS-* family may be more important to an enterprise oriented venture.

The gap between approaches may itself present some opportunities. It really would be nice, for instance, to have some of the privacy and integrity capabilities from XML Security and Signatures, or to be able to make some assertions about message reliability when needed, but without buying into the whole SOAP/WS-* stack. There are thoughts on such borrowings here and there on the net, and certainly a need.

From the investor's perspective it may be difficult to find exploitable opportunities in this mode that do not devolve into mere features, or open source projects. Attaching a viable business model enabled by the new capability could be a big challenge. Among the best positioned to make hay of the opportunity are those who already provide RESTian services. Interestingly, Amazon is probably in the best position. As it has moved into providing a scalable, raw service infrastructure (*cough* - timesharing - *cough*) through S3 and EC2, it has found the need for some of the capabilities that REST alone does not provide. Sure enough, one of their offerings is a queueing service within its infrastructure. Amazon is setting itself up to combine reliability within its infrastructure, with ubiquity via REST outside of it, a well-thought-out approach to blending the architectures. ...

Technorati Tags: REST, WS-*