Sometimes I miss the 1990s. Building websites was so easy. Half the stuff was just brochure-ware: you'd use a website design program, FTP up the web pages, and you were done.
If we ever needed to build an actual interactive application, a designer would simply create something in Dreamweaver. They give you the HTML, you'd get the userID from a cookie, and you'd write a program to spit out that HTML. You might have to build up some SQL to get some table data, but the whole process was drop-dead simple.
Then suddenly front-ends got very complex and our database designs started to change under our feet, and the whole system got hard to maintain. We abstracted out the database with object relational mappers (ORMs) -- classes that would load the code from the database given a simple ID or query -- and our designers began giving us mockups that were PDFs and GIFs. On the front end, we separated the design from the content with cascading style sheets and content management systems.
But ORMs had a problem -- performance. Not only did they execute far too much SQL to load a single dataset for a table (think: one SQL statement per object -- or more) but when we got into multiple users at the same time, the whole system fell apart.
Enter web services
About that time, AJAX came to town, and our Javascript started to inject DOM elements directly based on the results of web services queries -- SOAP or REST. Now around 2003, when web services were becoming popular, I admit, I was a skeptic. It seemed to me a lot of work to "wrap" SQL statements that we all knew and loved from the HTML. It was like we were doing everything twice -- and paying for a whole new team to maintain a middleware server while we were at it. It seemed silly.
Looking back, if web services were a solution in search of a problem, our team didn't have any... in 2003. Today, I have clients that do electronic data interchange with other companies and need a way to perform orders that can alter, yet be backwards compatible. I know people doing e-commerce applications where there is no "server-side" code; the front-end is HTML with Javascript that calls web services directly, then parses those results to populate the web page with its data.
More than that, there are people building and selling applications on top of open APIs. ScoutPal is an independent company that has wrapped Amazon's APIs into a web page. For a small monthly fee, you can use your iPhone to scan a barcode, and Scoutpal tells you what the product is selling for on Amazon used, and how often it has sold lately. This could turn a morning at the library's used book sale into an entrepreneurial exercise. Or you could take none of the risk, and use Cash4books; these folks use an iPhone app and give you a straight-up price, and then they try to sell it. Of course, I expect they connect to several APIs, like eBay and Amazon, on the backend, to figure out if the book will sell, and for how much, before making you an offer.
It's not just Amazon. In the past 12 months I've met with teams at Zappos, Intuit (think Quickbooks Pro and Turbotax), and Royal Caribbean. Every one is creating an external, services-based API. Third parties that hit those APIs get to create entire businesses and provide a living for themselves, while funneling traffic and sales to the parent company.
Meanwhile, services have another advantage: They can be consumed by anything. When I was at Socialtext, we took our entire micro-blogging product, Socialtext Signals, and re-wrote it as a desktop application that called services that already existed. The original application took months to build, while the desktop app was a working model in less than a week, deployed in under a month.
What does this mean to me?
As the web continues to evolve, it also continues to be diverse. There is no law against building a SQL-based site or in running a simple content management system. Bigger organizations, though, will find they can tackle complexity by wrapping applications in services -- and pick up customers and partners by making those services external.
There's an opportunity there. Is your team taking it? What, how far, and what's next? I would love to hear about it.
— Matt Heusser is principal consultant of Excelon Development.
increasingly, governments -- whether it's federal, state, or city -- are doing the same thing, to increase innovation and provide more services to citizens. It's enough to make me want to start programming again.
@mitch - I remember those days too, like back in 1997, when I offered to do my website for my insurance agent freelance. If I recall correctly, she said that her son, who was in 10th grade, had already done it for them.
Since that time, I think it's fair to say that there is a little more room for differentiation between GeoCities and a RealWebSite (TM). :-)
I remember a few conversations with the CIO who brought Wells Fargo online. He described building the company's first website in an afternoon. He installed the Web server (this was before Apache, I think), then got in the elevator to the lobby of the building, where there was a bank branch. He grabbed a couple of brochures, scanned in the images, retyped the text, and bam! Website done!
We used to call primitive websites "brochureware." This site was literally that.
Since then, Wells has gotten a bit more sophisticated....
@Matt I enjoyed visiting the web of the 90s. I didn't join the fold until the mid 2000s. I scan job descriptions with some regularity to see the current wishlist of skills employers are publishing. It is really amazing how far the industry has come just in the last few years. I think back to the days where raging debates over the use of tables for layout was the biggest thing going on.
"I think the real opportunities are in taking the new complex world and making it easier for customers/emploees to use.'
It sure is interesting how these new solutions abstract and hide the complexity, but you're right, we've always been doing that, since my IBM PC Jr told me my floppy drive was called the A:\ drive -- I never had to worry about writing data to sectors and tracks and moving magnetic heads on media now, did I? :-)
@Thinkernetter - Sure. The simplest examples are sites that take their capabilites and offer them to the public at large - think Facebook Login, Your Twitter Stream, or a list of Amazon Search Results. Instead of returning a web page, the sever returns data in a structured format (usually XML or JSON). These results can be processed so the consuming application can create a reasonable GUI - either a web-page or a native device GUI. One great example of this is tweetdeck.
Large travel agencies are using the public API from Royal Carribean to create their own cruise scheduling applications - that might consume services from several cruise lines, airlines, a taxi service -- you name it. A dozen or so companies are extending the capabilities intuit has with quickbooks - to build add-on applications - and they are doing it with the QuickBooks API. The 'solution provider' sees a niche need and can sell the application over iTunes, solving a problem for some customers (before they switch to something else) and tying customers more closely to Intuit along the way.
And, of course, we see amazon stores, Etsy stores, and Ebay stores. The company creating the API benefits from these by driving sales, while the trade partner is usually either selling their own product, or making a small profit through an associate program.
You could think of this, a little bit, like Yahoo's store from the 1900's, but instead the company is offering a public web page, the company is offering public URL's which can be manipulated to do things - from get recent tweets, to post a tweet, to search, get mentions, send a direct message, etc.
Nice stroll down "memory lane" Matt. I think the bigger question is "why simple things become complex"? Is it because technology changes at the "speed of thought" (Thanks Bill Gates)? I think the real opportunities are in taking the new complex world and making it easier for customers/emploees to use.
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Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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