Chapter 8. Back to the Future

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	XML, Web Services, and the Data Revolution By Frank  P.  Coyle
	Table of Contents

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This chapter is about the future. Not the future in the guise of the next great technological breakthrough , World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation, or powerful application program interface (API), but the future of technologies and systems that are already with us, waiting to find their place in the space of the Web and to combine with other technologies to open up new opportunities and new applications. The two technology families we're referring to are peer-to-peer (P2P) and legacy applications, one very new, hot, and in vogue , the other older, traditional, and a bit stodgy.

P2P represents a new way of communicating and sharing using the Web as an infrastructure. The recent past has seen the power of P2P in the form of Napster, the music sharing system that has shaken the music industry. Other applications of P2P include Groove Networks, which has initiated new ways of building collaborative applications that target small virtual groups over the Web.

Legacy is at the other end of the spectrum of newness. By "legacy" we refer to software with a long shelf life that was built around mainframes and was commonly written in COBOL. During the past decade mainframe-based legacy systems have struggled to find a place in the rapidly evolving world of client-server middleware and component frameworks. Now with the arrival of the Web, a renewed interest in data, and the capability to move that data around using common Web protocols, mainframes have taken on a new luster. In a strange twist of technological fate, mainframes are finding themselves more suited to the P2P world than are the client-server systems that, only a short time ago, were seen as mainframe replacements .

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