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.

In turn, these categories can be incorporated into floating channels that can be integrated into Web logs within your domain or syndicated around the network. UserLand is working on a front end for the Frontier/Manila macros that drive these channels, but today you can cut and paste example scripts to turn on the feature.

That’s Radio’s simple secret: Capture the energy and entrepreneurial spirit of its scripting developer base and share macros and ideas via the community-building Web log infrastructure and peer-to-peer architecture. It’s p-to-p because Radio lives not on the server but the client, generating the pages as they are authored and upstreaming them to your choice of UserLand’s Apache server or your own.

It’s easy to think of “simple” as a put-down. Indeed, Winer’s critics suggest his opposition to WSDL stems more from a lack of resources than anything. But you don’t have to look far to find an example of a large company — IBM — leveraging the Linux community to take advantage of contributed work. The guiding logic of that community is the value of the commons, where shared code becomes a platform on which innovation and implementation produce differentiation and revenue.

Perhaps that’s why Java’s author James Gosling is busy these days building advanced development tools on top of the open-source NetBeans infrastructure. Why doesn’t Lotus contribute its QuickPlace extensions to the browser for improving IE’s editing and file management capabilities? Microsoft won’t do it for fear of cannibalizing its Word and Office revenue.

Meanwhile Winer is using his Web log technology and community to broker deals with open-source IM (instant messaging) player Jabber and Web log competitor Blogger. When Blogger architect Evan Williams demonstrated the next version of Blogger Pro at a Web log user group meeting, Winer posted notes about the product features on Scripting News. Because Radio supports the Blogger API, the competitor in effect becomes an extension of the other product. Now that’s Web service, a virtual Peace Corps.