[kw-pm] new member :)

[lloyd carr]

> Apart from the acronyms, web services are published protocols for
> applications to talk to each other via the web.  They let your perl
> programs talk directly to google and amazon for example.
>
> Why use these instead of WWW::Mechanize or other webpage-parsing
> modules?... Good question...

UGH Daniel! Why use a service in place of HTML scraping?!
Why use XML when HTML will do just fine?!? :-(
Why use XML-RPC in place of CGI?!

As Daniel demonstrated in his excellent talk on modules, of which his beer
coasters are an excellent example, it is a great good to hide the
complexity and specifics of you implementation as inside a module. Dare I
say that is an even greater good, that in addition to hiding the
complexity and specifics of your implementation, you make it possible that
the client and service need not reside on the same machine or be written
in the same language or be running on the same OS! The hype and acronym
soup may collapse under it's own weight, as it should, but I can still see
many applications in our heterogeneous networked world.

The web in web service is perhaps misleading, the WWW of browsing and
surfing is only the smallest fraction of where this technology could be used.

-Lloyd