Coming to a Computer Near You [Tim Bray in BW on Web services]

Coming to a Computer Near You [Tim Bray in BW on Web services]: "Politics aside, the suite of Web services technologies is growing awfully large and complex, it's far from finished, and people are wondering if it's going to end up working any better than CORBA and DCOM did. One important indicator will come when the big company projects turn into products: Microsoft's Indigo, Sun's Kitty Hawk, and whatever IBM is cooking up. They'll either be simpler, cheaper, and better than what we have now, and will change the world -- or not.
Meanwhile, those weeds are rustling. Amazon.com (AMZN ) is doing tens of millions of Web services transactions a day, without waiting for the 'official' products and protocols. Salesforce.com (CRM ), eBay (EBAY ), and Google (GOOG ) are at work here, too. Far back in the bushes, some of the people who built the Web are advocating a radically simpler way of thinking about Web services, called REST (representational state transfer). It forms the basis of the new Yahoo! (YHOO ) Web-search service launched at the end of February.
Web services will happen. But they'll probably come at us from a surprising direction."