I’m genuinely paranoid about banging my own drum and shouting “Listen to me!” because I know how often I’ve been wrong about things, and how much of the future is determined by luck and raw random chance. That said, if the lessons I’ve learned over the years mean anything, there’s a conversation going on right now that’s real important. Here are three starting points: Going Down To The Crossroads from Don Box, Styles: Beyond WS and REST from me, and Spending the $100 from Don. They aren’t the whole conversation, but they reflect it well and have pointers to most of the rest. Right now, a lot of people think that Web-flavored frameworks are the future of heterogeneous-network applications, which is to say almost all applications; and that the WS-mountain is really a WS-molehill; and that we need to fix up the tooling for developers. Depending how much pull Don has, Microsoft might be first off the mark; fair enough. But I really think this deserves attention. In an interesting sidelight, Rob Sayre (in comments here) and Dare Obasanjo have agreed with Sam Ruby that if you’re building an actual application using Web-flavor APIs, well, by golly, you ought to play by the Web-Architecture rules. Glad you guys think so.
