Web services are the beginnings of the next generation of expansion in computing power, says Larry Mittag.

Speaking exclusively to WSJ Industry Newsletter, Larry Mittag, VP and chief technologist of Stellcom, Inc., the premier San Diego-based systems integrator, says: "As far as most people know, .NET and SunONE have something to do with the whole software-as-a-service thing and involve XML in some fashion. The message gets pretty murky after that, so most people get bored and ignore it. But in reality, these initiatives are the beginnings of the next generation of expansion in computing power."

Mittag went into more detail: "The current programming paradigm is based on desktop computers running some flavor of a Windows operating system on x86-based hardware that is connected to a network through an Ethernet cable. This is solid and well-established. In other words, it is boring."

"The first-generation attempts to extend this model to handheld devices were terrible," Mittag continued. "People tried to slap a Web browser on anything that would sit still long enough. Most of these were just plain silly. Cell phones gained a little headway by redefining what a Web browser is through WAP, but that requires too much change in applications that just got through changing to grow Web interfaces to begin with. These approaches largely have not been successful."

The Web, explained Mittag, is a centralized-computing phenomena. "This central server decides what the data display looks like on the terminal device. It also retains all knowledge of what the data means.www.weather.com can put up a screen that tells you what the weather will be, but it doesn't structure the data such that your PDA can interpret and use that data. HTML tells the terminal device what the data looks like, not what it means."

Why is .NET and SunONE any different? Mittag was concise: "Simply put, .NET and SunONE provide the capability to publish data that can be used by computers, rather than just browsers."

XML's the Key
Before explaining the significance of this for wireless communications in particular, Mittag set the scene for a fuller understanding of the role played by XML: "The key technology here is XML. The tag structure of XML is very similar to that of HTML, but the tags label the data as to what it means rather than what font or color to use to display it. An XML-based www.weather.com would allow your computer to manipulate the raw data rather than just displaying it. Now your handheld device is free to be a computer rather than just a terminal."

This, asserted Mittag, was the crucial point to understand. "This is tremendously significant for wireless communications," he affirmed. "All of the WAN technologies (GPRS, CDMA, CDPD, and so on) get dinged based on throughput because the terminal devices are deeply dependent on getting an up-to-date display from the Mother Ship."

"If my cell phone knows that I am interested in movies," he continued, " then why hasn't it downloaded the schedules before I ask for them? Why do I have to log into a server to get my e-mail on my Palm VII? Both of these requests in current systems can fail if I am in a bad communications area. They also can be frustrating because the data is not sent until I specifically ask for it, so the slow transmission times are seen as a significant problem. Why can't the devices take advantage of good communications areas when they sense them and preemptively get the data? That is something that computers do, not terminals. If I am not staring at the device while it is loading the data, why do I care if it takes several minutes?"

Turning Data Into Information
The implications of publishing data in the form of Web services, according to Mittag, are extremely significant. "There's a tremendous volume of data available on the Web, but there's comparatively little information. Publishing that data in the form of Web services allows your local computer to collect that data and turn it into information. This is true whether your local computer is a mainframe or a PDA."