I love web services

One of the techy trends that made headlines and filled articles but left me cold, now one of my favourites - XML and web services.

I used to say to people "All I am hearing is blah blah blah". A solution waiting for a problem, I thought. It seems I was both right and very very wrong. I'm still not convinced by reasons to use XML as a database - traditional relational databases and SQL don't seem very broken to me, OO databases are interesting in theory but can't be arsed to look much into them. XML to me is fine for news feed data, configuration data and for "glue" between systems and representations.

And that is where we get to my point (sometimes I do have one, honest). I love the fact people can create content and services, I can strap on an interface, and voila, mucho value added pretty darned painlessly. My only gripe is the flakyness factor - my two XML and web servies dependant pages http://chrisg.com/usefultools.aspx and http://chrisg.com/news.aspx were down much of this morning because of the providers, not my site or code (apart from the distinct lack of error trapping ;O) ).

Being wrong about XML makes me wonder if I was wrong about other things. Perhaps I should have tried OS2 Warp? Maybe I should rent out the "sex in the city" box set? Hmmmm ... let's not get carried away ..