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by dion.
Original Post: Tim Bray: Learning from users. Here here.
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Tim Bray has just talked about a conversation with Mark Hapner (Mr. J2EE).
I was talking to Mark Hapner, a smart guy here at Sun who does heavy Java architecture, about WS-Sanity, and he had an angle thats new to me. In recent decades, he points out, good new technologies have first appeared in rough-and-ready form on the Internet, then migrated into the enterprise. (I remember when query tracking first showed up on the FedEx site; that was ten years ago, and it instantly opened a few million eyes to a better new way to deliver data). But all the WS-* hullabaloo is trying to go the other way; its trying to model all the (necessary) complexities of current IT infrastructure and turn them into many thick layers of abstractions wrapped around a Webbish core.
So, if you believed in history, where would you look for the future of Web Services? Youd look at the people who are doing them in a rough-and-ready fashion out there on the Net. The names that come to my mind are Amazon, Google, EBay, Salesforce.com, maybe SABRE. Whatever theyre doing, thats Web Services or SOA or the Services Fabric or whatever you want to call it. Anything they dont need, maybe it isnt going to be real important.
Here here. Shouldn't we always be doing this? We need to find the various types of users and learn from their real world experience. Amazon, Google, etc are a good start, but we shouldn't ignore the many other companies out there trying to get work done. Too often, standards bodies have vendors making all of the decisions.
In theory, vendors have customers, and hence should know their pain... and fight for that pain. However, for some reason this doesn't always seem to happen (some vendors are good about it though). Often the politics of where the company is going get in the way. It is hard to blame them. If you are a vendor and you have a chance to give yourself a competitive advantage, or maybe help with lock-in (*cough*EJB vendors*cough*) what would you do?
It would be really cool if part of the process would be "look for, and bring in users" to the group. JDO 2.0 did that. Users argue for things they want, and vendors discuss implementation details that the users don't care about.
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