I have to admit that I am a great fan of RSS. And I have always considered RSS feeds to be Web Services. Alright, they might not technically qualify to be Web Services according to the W3C definition. However they are sort of a stripped-down and cheap version or what I would like to call a "poor man's" version of web services.

Why do I feel so ? Let's try comparing the formal web service approach to the poor man's approach:

• Web Service Description:
  
  
  • Intention:

    To communicate with a Web Service you need to know message formats.

  • Formal approach:

    Write a WSDL for every web service that you need to expose. The WSDL would define the message formats, datatypes, transport protocols, and transport serialization formats that should be used.

  • Poor man's approach:

    There is a well know message format that everyone needs to use. And THIS is the format.

• Web Service Discovery:
  
  
  • Intention:

    Finding the end point to connect to

  • Formal approach:

    Discovery can be registry, index or peer-to-peer. UDDI is a standard registry based approach. UDDI exposes Technical Models or tModels. Use UDDI APIs to query the registry and obtain WSDL of the webservice that you intend to connect.

  • Poor man's approach:

    Scrounge through the web site and search for an orange button labeled "RSS" or "XML". When you find it,Click on it. If you want to do a wild search, use a feed search engine like Feedster.

• Web Service Security:
  
  
  • Intention:

    Authentication, Trust and Security policies

  • Formal approach:

    Use Web Services Security with a Token Profile.

  • Poor man's approach:

    Security ... huh ?

    .

• Web Service Integration:
  
  
  • Intention:

    Connecting to the service.

  • Formal approach:

    Write code that can send SOAP messages in compliance with the WSDL, after you have obtained the WSDL by making UDDI inquiry calls to the UDDI registry. Make sure to satisfy all the security mechanisms.

  • Poor man's approach:

    Open your favorite feed reader, Click on the big "New Feed" button, enter the URL and click Finish. Ok, If you want to code it yourself, write a java program (or even a shell script ) that can get the XML from the endpoint and parse it before displaying.

There you go !. As you can see, RSS follows the web services template but with a highly simplified approach. IMHO Simplicity is the essence of RSS's success.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am a great fan of Web Services as well. I have written a lot of web services code. I have even dared to read a few documents from W3C :). Web Services are complex because they try to represent real world business processes, which are inherently complex.

However, my opinion is that real world adoption of web services will occur by radically simplifying the web services model ...like RSS. Simplified models would further evolve to more complex ones, taking each need into consideration( compare RSS 2.0 and 0.9)

Hmm .. hey wait a minute. There was something I was wanted to announce through this blog entry and that's the reason I am writing this. Oh yeah ! The Portlet community has just setup up an RSS feed. You can find it here.

Check it out and enjoy Webservices...the poor man's way ;)