Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

5.7 GOING BEYOND PUBLISHING WITH WEB SERVICES

There has been significant momentum concerning the adoption of the Web paradigm for all kinds of applications. It is so easy for anyone to publish information, particularly if the resulting web pages do not require database queries and can be constructed as static pages using a web-publishing tool, such as CityDesk 2.0²³ from Fog Creek Software or the popular Microsoft FrontPage²⁴, which is part of Microsoft Office.

As of 14 September 2003, when I first wrote this chapter, a glance at the homepage of Google²⁵, the most popular search engine on the Web, showed the following line:

Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages

That was a lot of pages back then, Google no longer indicate how many pages, but it is obviously a much bigger number.

The popularity of the Web has resulted in widely available infrastructure, including web servers, routers and firewalls configured (and optimised) for web traffic. The other infrastructural momentum is that which has arisen around the number of software solutions with embedded web access or HTTP awareness. This ranges from high-end enterprise systems, such as popular CRM²⁶ products like SAP, which now has a web interface, to software development tools and libraries, of which there are a plethora offering built-in web support. It is easy for a relatively novice software engineer to construct a program that is able to network with the Web. The motivation is to consume the information into the innards of an application, ...