After the great World Cup match (3 to 0 against Ukraine) that brought Italy to the semi -final match, I didn't really have much desire for work, so I started surfing the web, hitting quite a few interesting pages and blog entries. After looking to Delphi specific stuff (including Nick referring to my last blog entry), I got to my full list of blogs. I noticed two posts by Danny Thorpe at his new Microsoft job. He tells about the Windows Live Dev site and his TechEd 2006 experience (very interesting read, including the many references to his former Delphi community).
So I did visited the Windows Live Dev site. I notice they have maps (didn't have time to comapre them to the Google ones) and a couple of other interesting services. What strikes me as strange from Microsoft is the openess of the platform and the fact they even choose XML over HTTP instead of SOAP for many web services. Considering that Microsoft has been the original proponent and strong backer of SOAP, this is indeed strage. By comparison, Yahoo is fully on XML-RPC (or REST), while the few Google web services (most of their APIs are JavaScript based) use SOAP.
And in my surfing I did hit another large number of articles discussing SOAP or WS- versus REST or XML-RPC. Here are a few of them:
- Are Web Services Real Part II, by Bruce Eckel.
- WS-* Non Existent Standard, by Steve Vinoski (including views from the W3C Web Services Architecture working group: "To the Web proponents, the Web’s architecture, known as Representational State Transfer, or REST, was already sufficient to support Web services")
- Services Rise to the Surface, by Larry O'Brien.
There is also a new interesting approach in making different services work together in a mushup, but that is worth a different post, like the Google Browser Sync Firefox extensions I ended up installing... but I should blog the full list of my Firefox extensions, which could lead to interesting suggestions.