Thursday June 09, 2005
Thursday June 09, 2005
Services in action
Stumbled across the following today ... it's worth a read. The essence of the story is that developers have discovered (in this case) ways of accessing / manipulating the Google mapping service engine and are coupling the results with other data / services sources to construct new applications for special purposes.
For instance, go to the following location and look at the results of merging Chicago crime statistics (which include location information) with a Google map.
Granted, it seems that some of the sites listed (the predator page is particularly scary) are unofficial in nature but perhaps that's the whole point... businesses will soon (if not already, look at the number of RSS feeds out there) be providing their data as services and it won't take very much for an enterprising developer to cook up an app which has never been seen before, one that provides value in new an interesting ways. Unfortunately, the "for fee" bit could very likely stifle the innovation needed in this new world of building applications from loosely coupled services; the challenge will be figuring out how businesses and entrepreneurs can monetize their creation(s). It's likely not hard, but does require thought (it's banner ads all over again ... hopefully not!).
Building these applications will be a challenge looking forward as well ... with relatively simple applications, it's a pretty straightforward task with basic web design tools and an IDE today. But as the applications become more complex (where complexity is defined not in the usual lines-of-code manner but rather number-of-services * complexity-of-the-service-interaction), radically new design tools which promote visualization of those services and their relationships will be needed. This is the world of SOA and the tools that will be needed to build, deploy, maintain and manage SOA projects.
All in all, a big challenge (and some cool stuff beginning to materialize that hint, at least to me, where things are moving).
Until next time ... Peace ... Posted by brewin Jun 09 2005, 11:07:43 PM PDT Permalink