O'Reilly Network: Peer and Web
by Volker Weber
O'Reilly Network: Peer and Web Services are Technologies of Connection and Coordination: Imagine a technology that enables you to reach across the network into my file system, or that reflects a change in my document directly into a cell of your spreadsheet. I watched these kinds of demonstrations at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference with a curious sense of deja vu. I had seen all this before, almost a decade ago, in Windows for Workgroups. So what's really new here, beyond a protocol facelift that replaces SMB with WebDAV, and NetDDE with SOAP? The scale and richness of cyberspace changes everything. Now that the Internet encompasses all of those LAN-based workgroups and so much else too, new modes of collaboration can take root and flourish. (via Hugh)
