From: John Flynn (jflynn@bbn.com)
Date: 05/02/02
When Web Services Don't Make Sense Don't assume Web services will solve every problem you'll ever face. by Yasser Shohoud Posted April 29, 2002 According to IDC, the hype and noise surrounding Web services will reach deafening levels in 2002. Although IDC sees Web services as valuable technology for application integration and B2B ecommerce, it forecasts the hype <http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO67084,00.html> to increase exponentially in 2002. To counteract some of this hype, I'll point out two specific scenarios where Web services do not make sense. Unfortunately, I already see many developers implementing Web services in these scenarios, indicating that the hype got to them. It is clear that Web services offer the most benefit in cases where you want interoperability and/or remoting over the public Internet. That said, note these scenarios where you don't benefit from using Web services. Single-Machine Applications There are still many desktop applications for business and personal use. Some of those applications might need to communicate with others running on the same machine. In this case, it is almost always better to use a native API rather than a Web service. COM is effective in this scenario because it is fast and requires relatively little overhead. The same applies to server applications running on the same server: Use COM or some other native API to invoke one application from the other. While it's possible to use a Web service in this scenario, it is considered suboptimal and does not buy you anything. Homogenous Applications on a LAN In many cases, you'll have applications developed using Visual Basic and/or Visual C++ and COM and running on Windows platforms on the same Local Area Network (LAN). For example, you might have two server applications wanting to communicate with each other or, more commonly, a Win32 or Windows Forms client that wants to communicate with its server counterpart on the same LAN. It's much more efficient for two such applications to communicate using DCOM rather than SOAP/HTTP. Similarly, if you have .NET applications that need to communicate with one another over a LAN, you can use .NET remoting. Interestingly, .NET remoting offers the option of using SOAP over HTTP, essentially acting as a Web service. But .NET remoting can also run directly over TCP and can utilize a binary format for the RPC calls which is supposedly more efficient than using SOAP. Overall, .NET remoting focuses on faithfully reproducing the remote object's interface whereas Web service focus on faithfully generating the agreed-upon SOAP messages. Again, you would not use Web services in a scenario where you had other viable options that are more efficient or make more sense from an application architecture viewpoint. About the Author Yasser Shohoud is creator of LearnXmlWS.COM, a site dedicated to Web Services resources. Yasser specializes in developing and delivering XML Web Services training to professional developers. A Web Services expert, Yasser speaks at several industry conferences and is writing a book titled Building XML Web Services <http://www.learnxmlws.com/book/default.aspx> (Addison-Wesley). Reach Yasser at www.LearnXmlws.com <http://www.LearnXmlws.com> . John Flynn (703) 284-4612 DAML Integration and Transition PM BBN Technologies
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