Shirky On P2P 97
There's an interview with Clay Shirky over at O'Reilly's OpenP2P network regarding P2P. Some of the piece is wordy ruminations over what peer to peer (and dear lord do I hate that term) is, and where it's going - but the most interesting part, IMHO, is the talking about web services and the changing definition of "client" and "server".
Web Services: How different from the Web? (Score:4, Informative)
There are growing criticisms of the consensus vision of web services -- http / SOAP / WSDL / UDDI -- largely on the grounds that its complexity is un-web-like, and that there are uninvented and possibly uninventable layers required above UDDI for any two arbitrary applications to be able to find each other in the dark.
Dave Winer of Userland [userland.com], inventor of XML-RPC and co-designer of the SOAP spec, advocates an embrace of these two protocols by the Open Source movement as a lightweight way to advance the battle for interoperability. (Dave's ideas in many ways answer the Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web? [earthweb.com] article form earlier this month.)
Another group, in line with your "Apache is all we need" idea, has taken Roy Fielding's idea of the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture as a way to extend existing web semantics furhter into the domain of applications. They have started a RESTWiki [conveyor.com] to expand on those ideas.
This is all a big mess right now, with no obvious clarity coming any time soon, but two things we can be certain of are that experiments with application-to-application traffic is going to increase dramatically in the next 12 months, whatever the framework, and that with MSFT driving this idea as part of
-clay