The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[David Bovill]

On 13 Nov 2005, at 19:12, Mark Wieder wrote:

> My main problem with web and SOAP services is that they seem to appear
> and disappear every six months or so. The only web services I use
> anymore in my code are weather.com and the various language
> translation services, and even there I try to script alternatives for
> when they eventually go away.

True - but you are talking SOAP and the state of play over the  
previous 5 years. As Dan has pointed out something is changing here -  
the xHHTPRequest functionality built into all modern browsers is the  
foundation for AJAX type services - RSS, ATOM and the rest in the  
blog and syndication world, and of course Google whose entire line of  
new product development is based on web services and AJAX in particular.

Frapr is just one example of this (based on Google Maps). Frapr could  
just as easily be embedded in Rev precisely because it is based on a  
stable Google web service. Expect to see a lot more stable web  
services emerge and then for people to start charging (not the end  
user) but the developers of customer facing services - take a look at  
Google Payments and what they are doing with video.

DIY programming based in Revolution is the mainstay for people on  
this list and the strong point of the RunRev IDE. However we all  
loose if we don't take advantage of these coming changes and have  
support for these services built into the Rev environment.

As a practical and relatively simple example - next month hope to  
start working on a Flicr (for some reason all this stuff gets spelt  
the same way :) browser in Rev.

Flicr has a simple REST based web service (think "get url" and  
"post") - the majority of images are released under a Creative  
Commons license to free to use (particularly for non-commercial use)  
- there are now 52 million Creative Commons lisenced works out there  
and the majority are photographs.

Anyone want to work on a Flicr image browser?