I sat on a panel back in 1998 that was discussing fat versus thin clients for mobile devices. Thin was the vogue at the time, with WAP getting ready to take over the world. I was pretty much alone in pointing out that the weak point was the communications link, which at the time was (to put it politely) not ready for prime time.

Now I see the argument being raised yet again in Craig Mathias' latest column. His take is that thin clients will reduce client complexity (true) and take advantage of unlimited connectivity (huh?). The oddest point he made was that Web Services would be used simply to personalize the communications. This misses the point that Web Services is the backend technology that makes full applications on embedded devices a winning proposition.

Web Services is simply a set of conventions that allow data to be placed in context. This allows applications to parse data based on tags that are meaningful rather than descriptive of the presentation appearance for the data. This allows information to flow between applications in a structured way. The result is mobile applications that can use the information on the Internet.

Do embedded designers understand this? Are embedded systems being designed to use Web Services effectively?

Larry Mittag