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Web Services By and For Desktop Users. Two interesting articles appeared on Monday, both addressing the impact of web services on end users. In his essay, How Infopath Works, Phil Wainewright summarized and analyzed an MSDN article describing this new add-on to Office 2003. It allows users to create forms that have an XML or web-services back end. It does indeed look interesting.
Over on Tech Republic, Jonathon Sapir wrote, Will Web services and SOAs change the development world?, in which he described a world in which "non-IT employees can take responsibility for computerizing their part of the business." Tech Republic has coined the phrase "personal services builder (PSB)" to refer to this supposed new class of tool. Unfortunately, I think Sapir's world isn't the real one. Unlike the InfoPath concept, he envisions users actually developing services to be consumed by others. (As I understand it, InfoPath doesn’t create web services, but it can utilize those that exist.) I’m highly skeptical of Sapir’s vision of the future for any but the most trivial functions.
Packages like InfoPath and Excel will become terrific tools for consuming and combining web services to create complex aggregated applications. And there’s no doubt that your typical power user will be able to do this with ease. But it's still going to take the IT professionals to create those services that the power users will depend on. Have you ever seen complex spreadsheets written by non-programmers? They're often incredibly inefficient, impossible to comprehend, and (most important) brittle. Not the kind of code you'd want behind a web service available to an entire organization. I know, I know...if web services are loosely coupled, we shouldn't care what’s behind the curtain. Well, we don't care what it is, but we do care that it's of high quality, scalable, and reliable. And user-created web services, for the most part, just aren't going to have those attributes.
The advent of the spreadsheet and other personal-productivity apps were a terrific boon to personal data processing. They allowed users to develop quickly many of the applications that might never be addressed by the formal IT-development process. But one reason for their success is that these personal projects were just that: suitable for consumption only by the author and a few close friends. I've got some terrific Excel spreadsheets that do all sorts of cool things, but they're not ready for prime time. I would never release them to others. The deployment of web services developed by amateurs should be limited in the same way, and I doubt you're going to see too many such web services listed, for example, in a company's UDDI directory.
Posted Tuesday, August 12, 2003 9:59:47 PM 
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