The Webification Of Applications

Bill Burnham (whom I remember from the days in which he was simply a Piper Jaffray analyst covering online brokerages) has a great post on how the democratic revolution that created the Web is about to hit the world of applications.

Like many people, I struggle to understand the impact of Web services and service-oriented architectures–and I’m in the IT infrastructure business! Bill’s post does a great job of pointing out how Web services do for the back end of applications what the Web did for the front end: Enable a massive proliferation of creativity and functionality.

In the old days, creating a GUI was a long and arduous task. Today, an HTML jockey can code one up in a day. Web services is going to bring the same revolution to the back end of applications. Sure, maybe they won’t be as fast, as secure, or as robust, but they will be much easier to develop. The cost of failure will be greatly reduced, which is probably the primary driver of experimentation.

I had thought that Web services were overhyped. Now I think that they’re underhyped, though I still won’t hazard any guesses as to who the winners and losers will be when the dust settles.