Re: RPG as Web service

[Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Walden H. Leverich
> Well, sharepoint's backend is simply SQLServer, so I wouldn't say
> that you cannot update it via ODBC...


Thanks for the clarification.  Microsoft's rationale for exposing a web services interface to the Sharepoint database as opposed to some other mechanism may be debatable, but the fact that they chose web services is applicable to this discussion in that it attests to how far people will go with web services.  Sharepoint is a mainstream product.

It's one thing to evoke a Google web service, passing to and from "address" parameters, and receive a response indicating driving directions from point A to point B.  But exposing a complete database takes web services to a new level.  In the first case, the web service is a calculation intensive process and scoped to a fairly narrow subject, while in the latter the web services are less compute intensive,  are more comparable to traditional database access, but scoped across the entire database.

Bottom line, folks are taking web services seriously.

Nathan.