Keeping it simple

DAVE WINER IS the keeper of the flame of "simple." He's the co-author of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). In his day job, he's the architect of Radio Userland, a powerful tool that simplifies the development and maintenance of Web logs -- personal narratives that both comment on the news of the day and sometimes make it as well.

To call Web logs, or blogs for short, personal is not to pigeonhole them as mere exercises in custom or vanity publishing. Certainly there are thousands of blogs devoted to the most intimate details imaginable, ranging from politics to soap operas. And the ongoing soap opera in the XML world plays out daily on Winer's flagship Web log, Scripting News.

As Winer detailed in his keynote at InfoWorld's Next Generation Web Services conference earlier this month, there's an ongoing battle for the heart and soul of XML Web services. On one side stands Winer and his small company UserLand software, plus a loose coalition of open-source and standards-bodies players; on the other side, Winer's partners in SOAP's evolution, including Microsoft and IBM.

There's actually a lot of overlap within these groups: At various times Microsoft's Andrew Layman and IBM's Noah Mendelsohn, to name two, have worked hand in hand to hammer out interoperability among the competing Web services visions. But as Microsoft and IBM added the more complex WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) to the Web services stack, Winer dug in his heels.

"If you don't understand [a new technology] first off and it makes your mind go numb, you're safe to ignore it [because] it will never work," Winer said to appreciative conference attendees, a mix of CTOs and venture capitalists.

Some of the reaction was surely anti-Microsoft sentiment, as developers sniffed out potential customer lock-in. For example, UDDI .Net ships only as part of .Net Server rather than as a freely available element of the XML Web services stack. Others see Unixlike fragmentation appearing among competing open-source initiatives from IBM (Eclipse) and Sun (NetBeans.)

But Winer gains strength from people such as BEA's Adam Bosworth, who's trying to make very complex things easy to implement. After showing an alpha version of his Cajun tool for developing and deploying rich asynchronous b-to-b Web service applications, Bosworth talked appreciatively about how Radio bootstraps Internet Explorer, which Bosworth had helped develop at Microsoft.

Radio hides Winer's Frontier server architecture and Manila scripting development environment behind a browser-based front end. The result is a writing machine that Microsoft should pay close attention to. Not only does Radio shield you from the internal workings of the Web services architecture to dynamically generate highly customized Web logs, but it goes beyond authoring as an XML router with a subversive peer-to-peer engine.

The key is another Winer collaboration, this time with Netscape, called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Two forks of the standard -- one simple and the other not so simple -- vie for what passes for market share in the standards arena. Radio takes each Web log entry and generates XML that can be flowed into multiple Web logs by checking off the appropriate boxes.