Web Services

The problem with distributed applications

It is easy to create a distributed application within a network. In fact, many technologies are available to do just that, such as DCOM, Corba, and Sun's RMI. However, there are major problems when doing so across network boundaries.

Security

Security is one of the snafus. Although the above technologies look good on paper, when it comes to dealing with inter-network security, they are very hard to work with and configure. Some even require additional development effort to work around security barriers. Thus, they do not scale well to the Internet where security conflicts are beyond the ability to resolve locally and/or easily.

Tightly coupled producers and consumers

Data producers and consumers are often tightly coupled together. This implies a homogenous structure to the producers and consumers involved. This also tends to promote "brittleness", wherein a failure may occur due to changing interfaces on one side breaking something on the other. Distributing modules across the Internet makes this more likely since at least one is not necessarily under your control.

The long haul

What happens when a company gets acquired or goes under? These things happen, and so it is hard to guarantee the unified infrastructure demanded by DCOM, Corba or RMI. Thus, there are difficulties scaling these technologies over time.

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