TaiwoA
11-10-2000, 07:08 PM
SQL Server Magazine (http://www.sqlmag.com/) Excerpt:
========== COMMENTARY ==========
Greetings,
Is Microsoft.NET just the latest Redmond buzzword for the next generation
of tools and servers that we'll have to spend precious money to upgrade to?
Or is .NET a fundamentally new way to architect and build systems? And what
impact will .Net have on database professionals like you and me?
I'm not a developer. Sure, I can sling Visual Basic (VB) code if I have
to, but that isn't how I earn my living. I need to know how Visual Studio
applications will affect my database, so I keep up with ADO and middleware
technology. But I don't get excited when Microsoft starts talking about a
new set of programming tools. Initially, I thought .NET was nothing more
than the next generation of the same old tools. My response? "Cool,
Microsoft improved VB and added threading." But when I learned more about
..NET, I realized how wrong I was. The .NET Framework could fundamentally
change the way we design, build, and deploy applications. .NET Enterprise
Servers--including SQL Server 2000--are cool. The new .NET programming tools
and common runtime are nifty. But the real architectural revolution lies in
the concept of a Web service.
What's a Web service? Remember TerraServer? Microsoft launched it a few
years ago as the world's largest SQL Server application. If you ever need a
satellite picture of your backyard, terraserver.microsoft.com is the place
to go. TerraServer has plenty of interesting SQL Server aspects, which I'm
going to ignore for now. The real news is that Microsoft has upgraded
TerraServer and relaunched it as a Web service called the TerraService.
Today, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has integrated the
TerraService into an application available to farmers and other
professionals in the agriculture business. Conceptually, USDA developers can
invoke methods and properties from TerraService as if it were a simple COM
component installed on the local network. Using a Pocket PC, a farmer in the
field can receive topographical or aerial photographs of any farm in the
United States. Microsoft and TerraServer alone could never have met the
unique needs of this agriculture application, and the USDA could never have
built its own TerraServer without leveraging the capabilities of a
programmable Web service. But together, the combined applications are
greater than the sum of the parts.
Web services transform the Web from a browseable resource into a
programmable resource, bringing us into an entirely new realm of
architectural options. Here's what the TerraServer home page has to say
about the new Web service: "The Microsoft TerraServer .NET Web Service is
designed to simplify the task of accessing TerraServer programmatically.
Developers call TerraServer Web Service methods to perform standard queries
against the TerraServer database. The Microsoft .NET technologies do the
'heavy lifting' to connect programs to the TerraServer Web Service via
Internet communication protocols and exchange data. All the programmer has
to do is call the provided TerraServer Web Service API methods and iterate
through the data contained in the data structures returned by TerraServer
Web Service."
Web services make the dream of true, loosely coupled,
distributed-application architectures a reality. But what does this mean to
database architects like you and me? Building and distributing Web
applications will soon be a mass-market skill. But making these distributed
applications actually work will still be difficult, especially when these
distributed, loosely coupled Web services share data that might reside down
the hall or halfway around the world. In particular, ADO+ (a core part of
the .NET framework) will change the way we manage distributed data. I'll
talk about ADO+ in an upcoming column. For now, check out the TerraService
and TerraServer Web sites. You'll find all the information you need to
integrate TerraService into your own Web application.
http://terraserver.microsoft.net (for TerraService)
http://terraserver.microsoft.com (for TerraServer)
___________________________________________________________
Copyright 2000, SQL Server Magazine
========== COMMENTARY ==========
Greetings,
Is Microsoft.NET just the latest Redmond buzzword for the next generation
of tools and servers that we'll have to spend precious money to upgrade to?
Or is .NET a fundamentally new way to architect and build systems? And what
impact will .Net have on database professionals like you and me?
I'm not a developer. Sure, I can sling Visual Basic (VB) code if I have
to, but that isn't how I earn my living. I need to know how Visual Studio
applications will affect my database, so I keep up with ADO and middleware
technology. But I don't get excited when Microsoft starts talking about a
new set of programming tools. Initially, I thought .NET was nothing more
than the next generation of the same old tools. My response? "Cool,
Microsoft improved VB and added threading." But when I learned more about
..NET, I realized how wrong I was. The .NET Framework could fundamentally
change the way we design, build, and deploy applications. .NET Enterprise
Servers--including SQL Server 2000--are cool. The new .NET programming tools
and common runtime are nifty. But the real architectural revolution lies in
the concept of a Web service.
What's a Web service? Remember TerraServer? Microsoft launched it a few
years ago as the world's largest SQL Server application. If you ever need a
satellite picture of your backyard, terraserver.microsoft.com is the place
to go. TerraServer has plenty of interesting SQL Server aspects, which I'm
going to ignore for now. The real news is that Microsoft has upgraded
TerraServer and relaunched it as a Web service called the TerraService.
Today, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has integrated the
TerraService into an application available to farmers and other
professionals in the agriculture business. Conceptually, USDA developers can
invoke methods and properties from TerraService as if it were a simple COM
component installed on the local network. Using a Pocket PC, a farmer in the
field can receive topographical or aerial photographs of any farm in the
United States. Microsoft and TerraServer alone could never have met the
unique needs of this agriculture application, and the USDA could never have
built its own TerraServer without leveraging the capabilities of a
programmable Web service. But together, the combined applications are
greater than the sum of the parts.
Web services transform the Web from a browseable resource into a
programmable resource, bringing us into an entirely new realm of
architectural options. Here's what the TerraServer home page has to say
about the new Web service: "The Microsoft TerraServer .NET Web Service is
designed to simplify the task of accessing TerraServer programmatically.
Developers call TerraServer Web Service methods to perform standard queries
against the TerraServer database. The Microsoft .NET technologies do the
'heavy lifting' to connect programs to the TerraServer Web Service via
Internet communication protocols and exchange data. All the programmer has
to do is call the provided TerraServer Web Service API methods and iterate
through the data contained in the data structures returned by TerraServer
Web Service."
Web services make the dream of true, loosely coupled,
distributed-application architectures a reality. But what does this mean to
database architects like you and me? Building and distributing Web
applications will soon be a mass-market skill. But making these distributed
applications actually work will still be difficult, especially when these
distributed, loosely coupled Web services share data that might reside down
the hall or halfway around the world. In particular, ADO+ (a core part of
the .NET framework) will change the way we manage distributed data. I'll
talk about ADO+ in an upcoming column. For now, check out the TerraService
and TerraServer Web sites. You'll find all the information you need to
integrate TerraService into your own Web application.
http://terraserver.microsoft.net (for TerraService)
http://terraserver.microsoft.com (for TerraServer)
___________________________________________________________
Copyright 2000, SQL Server Magazine