The Disappearing Desktop - It's Real This Time

[Dave Cragg]

On 13 Nov 2005, at 00:19, Dan Shafer wrote:

> From which experience i conclude:
>
> (a) AJAX and RIAs are not a panacea
> (b) $2 billion acconting firms IT shops probably don't embrace new  
> technologies in the first place (having seen *that* up close and  
> personal)
> (c) Moving information from one Web service to another is often  
> difficult because of all the impenetrable crap put in the way for  
> "security" in the first place
> (d) This technology has a ways to go.

I suspect the CIO was talking about "web services" in the narrow  
sense of something like SOAP (no longer word of the month). And if  
that's the case, I can understand his comments. I remember struggling  
to make the SOAP toolkit that was once distributed with Rev, and at  
the time thinking "what's the point?". The aim was basically to get a  
piece of dynamically generated xml from one computer to another - not  
very different from a web form and a cgi script. In this case, I  
think it's not the technology that has a way to go, but the  
definition of a clear purpose, without which committees will   
generate more committees until the camel is built.

>
>
> On Nov 12, 2005, at 2:34 PM, Sivakatirswami wrote:
>
>> The CIO of a 2 billion dollar accounting firm that handles movie  
>> and media events accounting for the likes of Warner Brothers and  
>> Disney, is on our team... he was just here in my office yesterday,  
>> explaining to me to be "very cautious" about using of web  
>> services. Warner Brother's forced them into it and he says the  
>> kajillion lines of code that have evolved from this decision...  
>> just to do the simple of things, where all that is really  
>> happening is a very little bit of data is moving via an XML  
>> protocol from one machine to another, is costing everybody, big  
>> time...he said "don't go there!"
>>
>> just FYI.