[uf-discuss] microservices

[Tom Morris]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Gustavo Garcia Bernardo <ggb at tid.es> wrote:
>  I was wondering how a web application could publish the support to offer a service for a type of microformat (i.e. hotmail could publish support to add hCards to your agenda and gmaps support to show a geo or addr in a map).
>
>  Something like IE8 Activities (Microsoft  openservice specification) but oriented to microformats (microservices/microactivities).
>

I'm not sure there is a compelling need for them at the moment.
Currently if you want to implement a service, you can quite easily
write an Operator plugin. Often data from the Web (including
microformatted data) will need pre-processing before submitting to a
service - which would seem to make coming up with a 'service
specification' both difficult and impractical. The approach of
specifying a 'web service' language has been fraught with difficulties
- as the current trend towards RESTful services instead of Web
Services Architecture shows.

It would be a good idea to collect alongside microformats and other
formats on the Web (whether embedded in markup or in other formats)
possible services which they are, could or should be compatible with.
If there is a common set of patterns between them, then perhaps it
would be appropriate to standardise them in some way.

I may be wrong - in which case, it's probably a good idea if we see if
Microsoft's OpenService stuff gets implemented anywhere outside of
Internet Explorer 8.

-- 
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/