BMB stands for Big Mind Bomb.

This is an unusually big one.

As I wrote the tutorial, I realized I've been writing it not for four days,
but almost 20 years. (I don't even want to know the actual number.)

It all began with a speech given by Microsoft's Bill Gates, in 1982. He was
getting a lot of grief about Lotus 1-2-3, and in his brilliant and feisty
way, he said that integrated software was a crock, what you really need are
modules of functionality glued together by scripting languages.

I immediately recognized this as the spirit of Unix, but applied to user
apps. Lotus was a spreadsheet. Its innovation, with the benefit of
hindsight, was that it added a graph-drawing program to the spreadsheet idea
pioneered by Visicalc.

Integration without an API. Gates was saying this is a crock. And he was
right.

(With a hat-tip to Mitch Kapor, Jon Sachs, Ray Ozzie, Bob Ramsdell, and all
the early people at Lotus, it was a *beautiful* crock, a step on the path, a
very important one.)

Then comes the Internet, and networking is easy. It takes a few years for
this to settle in, then we swing back to the desktop, and Gates is still
right, but instead of just thinking about integration on the desktop, we're
now working on integration on the World Wide Web.

I've had as my goal, since starting UserLand, to turn the power of
connecting apps over to the users. As a commercial developer, I learned that
if a developer does the integration, users know that they're being steered
into only one way of doing things, and the brightest and most interesting
users, the people we like the most, want their minds to explode with
infinite possibilities. My goal was to give them those possibilities in such
a way that the power could never be taken back.

So inch by inch, we've built and rebuilt this idea, here's the latest
incarnation.

http://radio.userland.com/webServicesTutorial

It's so coooool.

Dave