Tim O'Reilly kindly credits me with helping him get web services onto the radar screen at Amazon:
I am proud to say I played a small role in getting this API off the ground. Inspired by the ever-prescient Jon Udell , I started talking up web services back in my March 2000 JavaOne keynote . I was fascinated with Jon's idea that web services could do for the internet what the shell and pipes did for the Unix command line -- create a loosely coupled architecture in which people could build new functionality out of small, independent tools. But I was disappointed to see that web services seemed to go off into an enterprise black hole (what Clay Shirky calls EDI++ ), rather than becoming the freewheeling next generation internet programming and power user environment that Jon and I had imagined. [ Tim O'Reilly's weblog ]
Thanks, and congratulations, Tim! On the first morning of the Emerging Technology conference, I saw Jeff Bezos on a stairmaster in the hotel gym and thought...hmmm. So it wasn't a complete surprise when the new API rolled out recently.
I will in turn credit Sam Ruby and Paul Prescod for working, across the SOAP/REST divide, to make sure that the EDI++ and freewheeling approaches are not mutually exclusive, which they don't need to be.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/07/24.html#a352