doug> Matt Cramer wrote:
>> But one of the big buzzwords right now is "B2B", "business to
>> business": using the internet to transact with other
>> corporations.
doug> I thought that was last year's buzzword, in the dying moments
doug> of the bubble.
There's "B2B" as a technology marketing term, and there's a kind of technology project, often called "B2B", that seems here to stay, or, at least, hasn't been diminished by the stock market collapse (as far as I can tell).
I do editorial work on two O'Reilly sites, XML.com and OnJava.com, and they've both pub'd several technical B2B stories recently. Technical conference are full of talks, tutorials, and other tech sessions about implementing B2B-style applications and projects.
At the actual software development level, "B2B" stands for a family of business apps in which transactions between corps are highly automated. The canonical geek example of a B2B app is a products 'exchange' in which corps have software 'agents' that offer and purchase goods and services.
Some of the development projects are technically very interesting. A friend writes Java for HotelTools.com (which does 'hospitality industry information management', i.e., they handle reservations, check in/out, some accounting for small to mid-sized hotels, chains, and extended stay, corporate apt kinds of places). Hoteltools.c calls itself an "ASP", which everyone here's heard of already. The difference seems to be that an ASP application is the kind of thing that one corp outsources to another corp; most of them are infrastructural things.
One of the newer buzzwords, which isn't likely to reach the fevered pitch of the foo2foo meme, is "Web Services". I copy edited a piece in last week's XML.com which purported to be a Web Services primer if anyone's interested in figuring out what it's about. (If I'd been editor of that issue, I wouldn't have run the piece, but that's just my unofficial two cents.) This buzzword is interesting because it describes, more or less, a different technical approach to the same kind of application that's already being described, variously, by B2B and ASP. Thus, one source of confusion -- and we academics are the ones who are routinely bashed for jargon! -- is that technical marketing terms sometimes describe a *kind* of application or service, but at other times describe a particular *way* of creating a kind of application or service.
A fight over the future of the Web is shaping up between "Web Services" proponents, the chief of which is Microsoft, and proponents of the "Semantic Web," which is a construct of smaller vendors and being led by the W3C(.org) itself.
The overlap between ASP, B2B, Web Services, and the Semantic Web is considerable. From the geek's perspective, the buzzword stuff just gets in the way since it 1) provides clueless bosses something to fetshize about (there's rather a lot more of this than people think, I suspect); and 2) it needlessly complicates the conceptual work necessary to sorting out the commonalities and differences between these kinds of applications (which is an important part of good design, whether OOP or not).
O'Reilly covers all of this stuff, and each approach has various in-house advocates. The Web Services v. Semantic Web fight is interesting because it has both technical and socio-political dimensions, particularly as the Semantic Web proponents are interested in *some* non-corporate uses of the Web, while the Web Services proponents aren't.
Kendall Clark -- And one day... I am going to grow wings