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Dave Winer
SOAP co-author strives for simplicity and drives decentralization
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DAVE WINER'S COMPANY, UserLand Software,
released Radio UserLand 8.0 in the middle of January.
By the end of the month, it had turned in its best
sales performance ever.
Widely acclaimed, the new version of Radio, a
desktop Weblog tool, represents the latest step in a
long journey. Points along the way include 1980s-era
outline processors (ThinkTank and More), Macintosh
scripting (Frontier), Weblogging and content
management (Manila), content syndication (RSS, or
Rich Site Summary), and Web services infrastructure
(XML-RPC, or XML-Remote Procedure Call, and SOAP,
or Simple Object Access Protocol).
For Winer, the point of Web services is to enable
people to communicate in more powerful ways. As editor of Scripting News
and one of the founders and leading practitioners of the Weblogging
movement, he eats his own dog food every day. Why is enabling people to
write for the Web so important? From WordPerfect and Volkswriter to e-mail
and Weblogging, people have always used software for writing more than for
anything else.
The Web was meant to be a medium for sharing written communication, but
things didn't turn out that way at first. In Manila and now in Radio, Winer has
been steadily reducing the complexity of Web publishing.
"In 1999 we got the number of steps required to publish Web content down
from 18 to three," Winer recalls. "Now we're at zero steps. Just save a file
and you're done."
The new product blends a number of technologies UserLand has been evolving
for years, including peer-to-peer, XML content syndication, and Web
services. The key innovations in Radio? "Decentralization and simplicity," Winer
says. The decentralization takes the form of a desktop Web server. Formerly,
UserLand provided centralized services.
"The dot-com fantasy was that you got a lot of users on your central server,
and somehow monetized that," Winer says.
It didn't work out. So Radio had to decentralize, migrating parts of the
content management system to the desktop and making the centralized piece
as thin as possible. This particularly helps with CPU-intensive chores, such as
RSS aggregation.
Simplicity arises from a replication feature called upstreaming, which
automatically publishes locally managed content.
Winer aims to bring that same simplicity to the creation and use of Web
services. He co-wrote the SOAP specification, but he worries about SOAP's
complexity. Users who try to glue together Radio and .Net, for example, run
into problems. He shares the general view that SOAP interoperability is
improving, but he thinks the Web services movement needs to be more
user-driven. What will motivate users to produce and consume Web services?
One example: Megapublications woven from many online sources will require
and reward such use of the technology.
"Look at BoingBoing -- a team of authors, and now they have a guest blog as
well. They're really on to it." Web services to facilitate these kinds of
collaborations will soon appear, Winer thinks.
In other ways, too, services and tools will form around the activities in which
people routinely engage.
"The Internet has always been developed by paving over the cow paths,"
Winer says. He thinks as-yet-unwritten software can improve the kinds of
communication that e-mail and Weblogging enable.
"But since we're clueless about what that software should be," Winer says,
"we'll watch as the users make new cow paths."
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin - The Internet's most famous pair of Ph.D.s are still striving to make data more accessible
Clifford Neuman - For Kerberos co-author, security hasn't lost its allure
Ray Ozzie - Notes inventor envisions peer-to-peer technology supplanting e-mail
Vivek Ranadivé - Real-time computing pioneer is taking his message to the enterprise masses
Dave Winer - SOAP co-author strives for simplicity and drives decentralization
Mark Lucovsky - The brains behind HailStorm sees Web services as a hub for simplifying busy lives
Back to 2002 Technology Innovators
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Profile |
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| Dave Winer - This Web services evangelist wants to see the technology become more user driven. |
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Current position - CEO, UserLand Software; also editor of Scripting News |
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Age - 46 |
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Technology prediction - "XML-RPC will be the baseline for Web services
interoperability -- or if not XML-RPC, then SOAP, cast in the model of
XML-RPC: simple, easy to use." |
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Related Links |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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