Editor's Note
The New Web Services Era
The crackle of leaves underfoot. The first hints of frost across the pumpkin patch. The Jets playing a string of meaningless games. Once again, we find ourselves in the grip of autumn in New York. There's such a wealth of things to do around Manhattan these days—apple picking in Times Square, fishing tournaments in the East River, old-fashioned hay rides in the back of a yellow cab—that you could be here for years and not even scratch the surface.
Of course, the same could be said of SQL Server, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Remember the early 1990s? There was a pitched battle to see which DBMS would be the first one released for the Windows platform. At the time, the industry was in the middle of one of its earth-shaking shifts, from server-centric towards smart clients, thanks to rapid adoption of the Windows 3.0 GUI. Eventually we got three big names: dBase, Access, and FoxPro. Still, they were all standalone tools.
Since those early days, several database management systems have joined the fray, including SQL Server. In the past decade, SQL Server has become, in our opinion, possibly the finest piece of software ever created by Microsoft. Yes, that's a lofty claim, but think of what it's done for customers.
In the mid-1990s, the exploding popularity of the Web ushered in a second era of server-centric computing, where the faster and more powerful your server was, the better your site was. In just a few years, the real sites begat real e-commerce, while all the cool, unprofitable ideas people had were consigned to the automatic garbage collection of history. To be profitable online, it became vital to install systems that were fast and inexpensive. Have you seen the TPC results that SQL Server 2000 has produced over the past few years? On top of being a robust product, SQL Server has set a number of price/performance records in various configurations. (See https://www.tpc.org for details.)
But from a programming point of view, perhaps the most amazing new feature of SQL Server 2000 was its inclusion of XML-formatted data features. This feature single-handedly changed the way we think of and use data in our programs. We thought it was so important that we covered it in the first issue of MSDN Magazine. It's still amazing to recall what XML capabilities brought to SQL Server. All of a sudden, you could take this huge store of data and easily manipulate it any way you want and share it with users and partners. For the most part, you just had to understand XSL and XML. It really made it easier to "think outside the server" and create some nice data presentations without having to resort to the standard data table look (no offense, Dino!).
To make things even more exciting, around the same time that the SQL Server 2000 beta was available to devs, SOAP was developed. As you know, SOAP is the specification that makes XML Web Services a reality, and the .NET Framework is a way to avoid worrying about the particulars of SOAP as you put your services together. In this issue, we've gathered a bunch of articles that look beyond the simple how-to Web Services articles you're probably used to seeing. What if you're using C++ instead of C#? Or want to track Web Services usage for billing? Or want to implement a distributed solution in a Web farm? Or use external schemas in your own application? We're now into the second phase of the Web Services Era: real-world Web Services.
You can probably see where we're heading with this by now. You have SQL Server 2000. You have SOAP and the .NET Framework, enabling XML Web Services that can target a variety of platforms and devices. Put them together and what do you get? You can fill in the rest yourself, but the outcome is pretty sweet. As with most technology shifts, the hardware gets ahead of the developers for a while, then the programmers come up with ever more exciting and offbeat uses. Eventually, these uses become so compelling (like Web Services have) that they're incorporated into the platform. The potential of these tools and technologies is truly dizzying, especially when you consider that the new programs can span any combination of client and server processing and transaction cost isn't a killer consideration.
While we're already on our way—sites like MapPoint.net have demonstrated the business feasibility of Web Services, and TerraServer (https://www.terraserver.com) has shown the scalability of the DBMS—there's still a lot more opportunity for smart companies and entrepreneurs. This issue represents our latest attempt to get you there.
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