Hi Joel, You are right about Web Services and hype. It is though important to define what time-scales we are talking about. The time-scale for an OASIS-standard is around 18 months and during that period some of the missing WS-pieces will be solved as they are already in draft. Like WS-Security. But that's my view, it must be an _independent consortium_ to develop this.
The priciples however, can be put on paper (and in temporary code) _today_. I think the "business requirements" and it implications on the technical platform is important to discuss as all solutions have some problems actually. The _ideal_ solution requires local SW which I have removed from _my_ "business requirements". I think that replacing the whole need for local software by requiring the user to specify "ANYBANK.COM" is a small price to pay, particularly as it opens the door to _other_ payment systems that actually are _much_ more popular than VISA and MasterCard. This is the case outside of the US. If an on-line direct-payment system does not support that, it will not become mainstream as a lot of business still is local even on the Internet. But of course supporting other payment systems, is _not_ in the interest of the card-brands, but for the other three players: banks, merchants and consumers. >I would be interested to know what you mean by 'web services paradigm'. Do >you mean SOAP/WSDL/UDDI? Essentially yes. Although with the DNS twist that does the real change. >I don't agree with you that web services (however you define it) provides >more 'extensibility, robustness, extreme low-cost, Robustness1 & Extensibility: A protocol that does Service Discovery (using UDDI or similar) can dynamically adapt to a partners' capability. http://buyer.x-obi.com/BuyerASP/wsdfaq.html 3D's static model is a true dead-end in my opinion. Robustness2: user-specified DNS instead of "fragile" URLs stored in a centrally managed brand-directories that are _entirely_ redundant. http://www.x-obi.com/OBI400/UDDI-and-DNS-OBIX-2002.pdf Low-cost: The basic stuff is for free through the Apache foundation and .NET run-time I assume will be free as well. Anders
