This is not a Pipe

Every once in a while, something happens that makes me completely reassess my take on "what's next" in the technology sector. The original Macintosh was one such epiphany, Apple's Hypercard was another (Hypercard is a much-unappreciated program - had Apple added network links to it we'd have had a writeable, scriptable WWW in 1989). Netscape's first browser was a third. On Thursday, the release of Yahoo! Pipes shook my world.

The Pipes slogan is "Rewire the web", and that's what it purports to do - as a visual editor for RSS feeds that dramatically lowers the time and expertise needed to create a mashup. Pipes lets you create your own personal web channels, and Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has a great example of how to do this.

And so, if your interest is, say, the NFL draft, it's pretty easy to wire up all the draft-tracking sites so that if a potential 7th round pick out in East Treestump gets a hangnail, you'll know about it. But the implications go so much further...

In a REST-ian world, it's pretty easy, once you've modeled your world as a set of resources, to create RSS feeds that track the changes in those resources. With an application like Pipes, it's really easy to tie those feeds together into new applications. This is the future of "SOA" and "Web Services."

Forget SOAP, and the growing pile of WS-* standards as a means of wiring up disparate applications. REST-ify the applications, use RSS to publish the changes, and a tool like Pipes (or one of the imitators that should be quick to follow) to wire the whole thing up. SOAPians - put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Seriously, though, while the Pipes idea is great, there are still some issues to work through. The intuitive purity of the Pipes concept was proven when everyone from the merest script-kiddy to the deepest hacker jumped on Yahoo! and bought the Pipes site Down! all day on launch day. Yahoo! knows a bit about keeping large sites up under volume, so we are surely talking about a big human wave here.

But that's not all, either. XML is wordy, and XML transformation is slow and computationally intensive. I'm curious to see if the sheer processing load leads to more restricted (e.g. JSON) or more efficient/binary formats as a wire protocol for Pipe-y services.

I'm convinced these things will be worked out, and Tim O'Reilly's comments about Pipes as a milestone in the history of the internet will prove to be true.

As such, let this be my 14th prediction for 2007: February 7, the Pipes release date, will be looked back on as the day SOAP died. Not that it's bad, but the future has been shown to lie elsewhere.