Web Services
Privatization of a Public Idea

Written by Martyr2 on May 8, 2008 - Dream.In.Code Mentor

Back in the year 2000, when application developers were more optimistic about the future and where technology would take them, Microsoft and other companies were out to forge two new ideas. One was Web Services and the other was the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) service. But was the public ready and would ideas get off the ground?

For those new to programming, or old veterans who have heard of the technologies but never got into using them, web services are the exposure of technology services for use by remote client applications. A company would write the code, expose it on their site to the rest of the world and the world would build applications that call these services.

Think of it as a company providing a service like credit card authentication, using their own machines and technologies, but then allowing partners or clients to build applications which call up the service remotely and seamlessly. This would allow a client to then build an application which could handle their own customer purchases and authenticate their credit card info without the customer ever knowing that the company is actually using the service of a 3rd party. Kind of a slick idea isn’t it?

UDDI was the service which was to expose these services to the world in a registry style fashion and show developers how to call them (like they were remote functions). Companies would develop the web services and then publish them on the UDDI for use by the public or by partners/clients.

When initially released, the big companies (Microsoft, IBM, SAP and others) were trying to inform the public that it would be a good idea to develop services and become “service brokers”, potentially putting them in a new market as information dealers. But the biggest spin on this, and the key to its success I believe, was that the public should get involved and create their own services for free use. Allow developers in C# or Java or PHP to call up the Weather Network’s web service for local weather and voila instant up-to-date weather information through desktop or web applications.

But was the idea ever going to work for the public? What incentive did companies have to make a service freely available, publish it through a public UDDI, and keep it going without truly making any money on it? Why should a company share information that they could obviously sell? I think this was the flaw in the whole design. As a developer I would love free access to information. However, companies are out to make money and it takes their own money to collect the resources, pay the staff, and keep a service updated… they will not want to give it away for free. The technology idea was interesting, but when it was announced that the big UDDI registries were closing as of January 12, 2006, they pretty much said the idea of being open to the public was dead.

Today web services are still in use but primarily through partnerships and through internal processes to other companies. The IT department may keep a UDDI and a set of web services updated for use by other offices, other department applications, or by special partnerships where access is paid for but rarely open to the public.

I believe that January 12, 2006 was not the death of the web services idea; it was the beginning of making an initially public service idea into a privatized one. I think it was doomed from the beginning.


Example code, discussions, and tips - Martyr2's Programming Underground Blog

This post has been edited by Martyr2: 8 May, 2008 - 10:06 AM