re: WS-Bandwagon or WS-JustRight?

Len Bullard — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:36:53 GMT

It will be interesting to see if the WS series is an accelerant or a retardant. It may be both to different people at different times and that may just be a blessing.

Sitting here watching my team wrestle down NET2.0, Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005, realizing that while I am comfortable with Response.write, server controls are an unfolding mystery, I am convinced that the WS vs REST is not as much a cry about elegance and some instinctive resistance to churn. How often do industries renovate the fundamentals of building systems as often as we have since the web was launched. At the time when asked what it would mean, relying on my studies into cybernetics, complexity and chaos, and operant conditioning, all I could say was "Things will change faster" and so far that's been true.

But operant conditioning predicts too much change too fast makes for a very nervous rat that begins to bite the hand that feeds it. Then the little things like "why CAN'T we put the images in the APP_DATA directory and if we can't, WHY DOESN'T the MS DOC SAY SO!!!#@$#" begin to drive the rats nuts.

The cry for REST is a cry for simplicity but we do it by making it harder for someone somewhere else. After learning n-tier, we are told we are going back to two-tier because SQL Server stored procedures are now way more powerful and why not have the data server do the heavy lifting. That should make Michael Rys happy but I have to wonder how many paradigm changes one can absorb in a career or even a project before the spectre of Charles Babbage wandering muttering among the ever smaller boxes of labeled parts begins to haunt us.

The web is a car careening from turn to turn down the mountain. As Max Baer tells Bea Bennaderet when they finally stop at the Clampett cabin and she asks him why he didn't get rid of the brakes like she told him to, "I did, Ma. That's why we ain't got none."

I mean, I enjoy the ride but those stops are pretty fearful.