Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

Udell Argues that WS-* may be a combination of smart networks and smart nodes

Jon Udell: Are smart networks always a dumb idea? In this short posting Udell challenges the traditional Internet-centric idea that Internet services imply smart machines and a dumb network (in contrast to traditional telecommunications networks with dumb terminals - phones - and an intelligent network).

If Udell's hunch is right, this could mean that there is more going on in convergence than people thought. Don't forget that the telecommunications world was service-centric long before the Internet world. Maybe we still do have more to learn from each other.

Udell was focused on the WS-* technologies. Moving the argument slightly, into another sphere where Udell is an elegant spokesperson for emerging technologies, I still like the metaphor that HTTP and SIP are both protocols with a very small set of primatives that potentially enable a huge diversity of useful interoperability.... I hope that SIP can do the same for computer-telephony as HTTP has done for distributed computing: revolutionise by lowering the barrier to entry for innovative new services. Personally I'm not so hung up on where the intelligence lies as long as we all enabled to do more interesting stuff more easily....