Gortbusters.org's Journal: The Killer Web Service Apps?

Just came across this Jon Udell blog entry where he speculates that XBRL [eXtensible Business Reporting Language] might be the biggest new thing for accountants.

If the trend is to start putting your business practices in a [xml] schema form, conceivably there could be some great web service business opportunities. For example, if yer business is all represented in XML, why not have another company provide a service for constant monitoring of your business growth? Could be a great way to auto-magically generate reports, look at expected taxes, etc.

On a side note, it seems like we're having "revolutionary breakthroughs" thanks to XML. Being only a 23 year ole software architect, I must say that I'm a little astonished that this is the revolution. Didn't people characterize data before the late 90s? I guess it's similar to the way older engineers talk about Corba and IIOP while we now talk about robust SOAP web services. I'm sure there's tons of CORBA stuff still around, but they didn't really cover it in college

To continue my journal entry, turned rant, I think there's a growing trend to move away from binary protocols/formats and to parsed/interpreted text. First came HTML, followed by XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, XAML, XUL, etc. Even for phone systems, h.323 is probably on its way out and SIP is on its way in. If I were to guess at some reasons why this trend is happening I would have to say increased processor power (parsing text for real-time messages was not previously possible) and making the programmer's life easier. Ever have to debug a web service? It's cake.