What do you get if you cross an early 21st-century visionary CTO with a late 19th-century employee of the Edison Electric Light Company? Answer: a fantastic keynote address at Web Services Edge 2003 West, held in Santa Clara last month

The visionary in question was Allan Vermeulen, coauthor of the codehead's classic The Elements of Java Style and now CTO of the world's largest online retailer, Amazon.com. The Edison employee was Sam Unsell, whose contribution to the development of technology, Vermeulen explained, was to develop an economic model for electricity use in Chicago. As with electricity then, so with Web services now. This, in Vermeulen's view, is the next shoe that needs to drop.

"Somebody has to be the Sam Unsell of Web services," he proclaimed, meaning that someone in the Web services space has to come up with a good idea for what kind of an economic model is best suited to underpinning the technology.

Commercially available electricity, he explained, was only able to catch on and become pervasive because, with Unsell's help, the Edison Electric Light Company invented not just the first commercially practical incandescent lamp but a complete electrical distribution system for light and power – including generators, motors, light sockets with the Edison base, junction boxes, safety fuses, underground conductors, and other devices.

The comparison held the packed audience at the Santa Clara Convention Center, quite literally, spellbound. It was deemed by all who attended to be one of the most memorable and – pun intended – illuminating keynotes in the history of the Web Services Edge series of conferences and expos, which is saying something, since in previous years keynotes have been given by folks like the "Father of Java," Sun's James Gosling, and the "Father of Markup," Charles F. Goldfarb.

Vermeulen's ebullient opening keynote characterized well a conference that for three days brimmed with good content and animated discussions.

Interoperability
Among the keynote discussion panels was one that discussed the question "Interoperability: Is Web Services Delivering?" – moderated by Derek Ferguson, .NETDJ's editor-in-chief.

Ferguson asked the members of the panel to set the parameters of the discussion by first defining Web services, and it became clear that the invited experts on the keynote stage were in agreement that, while defined by the interop protocol known as SOAP 1.1, no longer do Web services necessarily have to be XML, or even over HTTP. The paradigm, they agreed, has evolved.

David Chappell, VP and chief technology evangelist, Sonic Software, stressed that in his view, while Web services interactions do not have to be across HTTP, "XML is key to defining what a Web services interaction should be. It's best suited for the role of serving as the language for describing the data that needs to be exchanged between applications."

Gary Brunell, VP of professional services for Parasoft, pointed out that "If we're going to use the term 'Web services,' it does suggest the Web, and so HTTP and HTTPS. XML is very important too," he added.

Meantime David White of Microsoft said he disagreed with the "Web" part of the term "Web services." "I'm a big believer in transport agnosticism," White said. "I'm really more concerned about the data representation and the invocation, rather than the transport. The key is to get something back and forth without great expense."

Chappell agreed: "To me the 'services' word is the more important, the service-oriented architecture part. Web services is now a more generic term for 'the next thing that's going to solve the problems we're trying to solve.'"

Mission-Critical Web Services Using .NET
Next the panel moved on to pinpoint whether Web services has yet become common beyond the firewall, or is still mostly being used for intra-company use.

Chappell noted that in his experience there is about an 80:20 divide in terms of adoption. "80% is within the corporation's control and 20% involves the public Internet (the Web) – dealing with other business partners for example." Brunell agreed that missioncritical apps were still "few and far between – that's why we are all coming to these conferences."

Microsoft's White noted that on the contrary he had seen missioncritical things happen inside Web services. "We've only just gotten there," he said, "but I have absolutely seen mission-critical Web services in our customer mass." Not out in the B2B space, he conceded.

JBoss Group's CTO, Scott Stark, pinpointed one crucial piece of the jigsaw that's still missing: "Single sign-on is a joke. I have about 35 accounts; no one has an agreement yet on a one-stop solution, and no enterprise technology can surmount that. J2EE is still basically a middleware technology," Stark continued, "it's not out there bridging enterprises."

The bridging role, then, remains perfect for Web services. He pointed out that XML isn't without its shortcomings. "XML is a double-edged sword. My head starts spinning after I've read the 10 different XML Schemas. So the usual technology curve also impedes the adoption of Web services. But that's just the nature of the beast."

Asked if XML might be replaced, White explained that one of the problems is that good tools are often the last thing to appear after what he called a "technology burst" such as the one we are seeing around Web services. "I'm not a seer," White said, but the key to widespread adoption of any new technology is completion of the specs (we're there), demos (we're getting there), and then the tools (they're coming)."

JBoss's Stark agreed. "XML isn't going anywhere. Before, there was IIOP and it went nowhere. Clearly XML is the only technology, however complex it might be, that's tried to address the problem. Besides, IIOP was even more complicated, and writing, say, a TCP/IP stack, is not a productive endeavor."

Stark then minted the phrase of the conference: "People have more comfort now with distributed programming; it's a tool for the times."

Enlightening .NET Sessions
By Derek Ferguson
The first day of the .NET track at Web Services Edge 2003 got off to a great start with an hour-long session given by Empowered Solutions' John Bristowe on Web Service Enhancements 2.0. Web Service Enhancements (WSE) is a Microsoft implementation for .NET of the WS-I standards for Web service interoperability. As John illustrated in his session, there are also numerous enhancements in WSE to make the job of the Web services developer easier. I sat in on most of Brad McCabe's afternoon session on Smart Devices in the Enterprise. If you think that you know everything there is to know about Microsoftbased devices, think again! I even learned things about the very device that I carry around with me (a T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition) that I hadn't known before. Then we learned a great deal about Tablet PCs, including the two main ways to develop for them (COM and .NET) and – perhaps most important – the myriad benefits of Ink (the Tablet PC's native data type for hand-drawn information).

The final session of the day was the legendary Jon Box's class on the ASP.NET Mobile Controls. As many of you probably know, this is a topic in which I personally have a pretty extensive background. Nevertheless, I learned at least four or five new things in less than the space of an hour – including the existence of a brand new Mobile Control at the www.ASP.net site that can do runtime image translation for different devices. Most cool!

All in all, I think I would have to say that the first day of Web Services Edge West 2003 was better than any other day I have ever spent at a conference. In addition to the content described above, I had a number of great conversations with other attendees. You can't quantify those kinds of experiences, but I suspect they are a function of bringing together a sufficient number of likeminded individuals in the same space – and there were certainly plenty of folks with Web services on their minds at WSE West 2003!

To see the full report, go to http://sys-con.com/webservicesedge2003west/4.cfm.

Day One
By Jon Box
Day One of the conference began for me with a keynote by Allan Vermeulen, CTO of Amazon. It was fantastic! Among other things, he showed several sites built on the Amazon Web services. These third-party sites are not just storefronts, which was Amazon's original intent. These sites do some very interesting things with the information and statistics provided by Amazon.

Vermeulen also showed us some sites that used Google Web services, including www.GoogleDuel.com, a site where two words are compared by looking at the numbers of hits on Google. In the demo, he allowed the audience to suggest two words for the live submission. To his shock, someone shouted out "Amazon" and "eBay." With some concern, the words were entered and submitted. When the page showed that Amazon was the clear winner, Vermeulen was as happy as anyone, even to the point of giving his assistant a two-handed high-five.

Other interesting third-party sites included www.allconsuming.com, www.YES.net, www.HiveGroup.com, and www.Grokker.com. For more information on Amazon's use of Web services, see www.amazon.com webservices. For Jon Box's full report, see http://sys-con.com/webservicesedge2003west/6.cfm.

Day Two
By Jon Box
To start the day, I attended Derek Ferguson's session on ASP.NET and Mono. Ferguson started with an introduction to ASP.NET, then gave an introduction to Mono on Linux, and ended with an ASP.NET demo with Mono. I found the following points interesting: