Groove Web Services
by Volker Weber
Jeff Chausse is all excited about Groove Web Services and thinks they are going to be a big deal:
I don't think I'm violating any NDA's by telling you that John Burkhardt did an in-house demo yesterday in which he took an empty C# project and, in 5 minutes, wrote a complete Windows app that listed his Groove Contacts. Oh, incidentally, another developer was running a command line Linux app, which did something similar. Don't want to use Windows to use Groove? Get a cheap Windows PC, install Groove, plug it into your LAN, and go hide it in a closet. Better yet, just set up an account on someone elses' Grooved PC. Build whatever interfaces you really need, out of .NET/Java/Perl/Fortran, and access it from your Mac/PalmPilot/WebTV/Commodore 64.
Let me get this straight: I should be installing Groove as a server on a Windows PC and then build my interfaces somewhere else and access the whole thing via Web Services, most likely without any security whatsoever? How strange is that? Wouldn't it be great to have the "web services server part" portable on any platform and then build on that with Win32, Gnome, PHP whatever?
Jeff quotes Jon Udell who is having some difficulties working with Groove on an Apple Titanium Powerbook with Steve "I see dead people" Gillmor who want to have his data on a Blackberry:
InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and I have always thought that Groove is the tool we ought be be using to coordinate our team's ongoing mind-meld, aka the InfoWorld editorial process. It hasn't worked out that way, though. I used to blame that on Steve, who has little use for communication that doesn't show up as text (in the body, *not* an attachment!) of e-mail messages delivered to his BlackBerry. As for me, I was perfectly willing to haul my ThinkPad everywhere ... until Apple's OS X-powered TiBook lured me from the straight-and-narrow, that is.
Don't get me wrong. It's a good thing, if you have a Windows-bound proprietary system without any standard interfaces and no meaningful way to export data, and you open that up. Jon put it nicely: "Lured me away from the straight-and-narrow". :-)
Comments
While testing the new subscription feature I lost the original post with 12 comments because I hit the wrong Delete button. Instead of deleting my test comments I deleted the post. Bummer.
You can read the old comments in the archive copy here >
BTW, I was a total shmuck in the last topic-) and I apologized to Volker.
Hey, that's OK. We all have those days. It's the Dilbert principle: We are all idiots, but not all of the time.