There is a vast gulf between the process mappers who model business systems pictorially, and the programmers who grind out the C++ or Java or .Net services that support those business systems. Between the two camps lies a fertile land of opportunity. It's time to jointly explore it.
Years ago, when the paint was barely dry on Visual Basic 3.0, a developer showed me a CD-ROM-burning application he'd written using that toolkit. The idea was to prototype the UI in Visual Basic, then rewrite in C++ for performance. But in the end, he admitted somewhat sheepishly, "we shipped the prototype." I saw nothing to be ashamed of. It was -- and is -- a brilliant strategy.
SOA (service-oriented architecture), we agree, is the way of the future. We'll build loosely coupled Web services now and wire them up into composite systems later. But as "later" starts to resolve into a date like 2003, or 2004, it's also becoming clear that SOA raises challenging issues. How, for example, do you monitor, test, and debug a distributed system when only some of its components are under your direct control?
A picture can be worth a thousand words. But a URL can be worth half a dozen pictures. When application behavior is expressed that way, you empower your community of users to share it directly.
Tim-Berners Lee once prescribed that a Web application's URI namespace should be opaque. If that axiom holds, it wouldn't be kosher to do what I did: Extract an ISBN from an Amazon URI and inject it into another application. Then Roy Fielding, who is co-founder of The Apache Software Foundation and author of the doctoral thesis on REST which provoked the Web services movement to rediscover its roots in the Web, weighed in.
The scriptable DOM (Document Object Model) was always an intoxicating idea. But when I saw the gymnastics those poor scripts had to perform in order to detect and adapt to browser versions, I recoiled in horror. Recently, though, I was pleasantly surprised to find that scripts I wrote in Mozilla, under Mac OS X, worked identically under MSIE 6 on Windows. This is great news!
For those of us who act as agents of technological change, it's tempting to chalk up resistance to fear of change. Users can't, or won't, learn new ways, we say, and sometimes we're right. But the reverse holds true as well.
We've envisioned using Groove to collect key sources of information, create and discuss work-in-progress, and transmit results through various channels. Now, thanks to Groove Web Services, we can.
Accessibility isn't only about including those who don't see (or hear) well. Services that connect to people will succeed best when they can adapt to the cognitive differences that make all of us unique.
Andrew Schulman, the author of Undocumented Windows, used to lecture on the many mysteries he had unraveled deep in the bowels of the VxD (virtual device driver) realm. "How do I know all this?" Schulman would ask rhetorically. The answer was NuMega's (now Compuware's) SoftICE.
Next week's issue of InfoWorld includes an article on the new XML capabilities of Office 11. While researching the story, I interviewed the architect of XML in Office 11, Microsoft's Jean Paoli, one of the primary co-creators of XML.
As we reported last week, Groove Networks showed me its much-anticipated SOAP API, which will be called Groove Web Services, and it's a beautiful thing to behold.
My wife, who runs a small business, recently confessed to her accountant that she is overwhelmed with bookkeeping chores. She asked me pointedly, "Isn't this Web services stuff you keep yammering about supposed to help straighten this mess out?"
Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist, likens Java to a baby duck. "When Java technology was born, it looked around, saw a Web browser and thought it was an applet," he jokes.
PKI (public key infrastructure) is a ball and chain that drags down our security efforts, all of which depend on the ability to manage identity and trust.
By my reckoning, J2EE was conceived at Microsoft in 1996, when legendary database guru Jim Gray was hired to lead the Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) project. In MTS, which begat both COM+ and J2EE, the COM object was the unit of distributed computation.
I've just returned from InfoWorld's conference, Next-Generation Web Services II: The Applications. One of the most memorable talks, for me, was given by Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole.
The XPath and XSLT techniques I mentioned last week will become as fundamental to this generation of developers as SQL was to the last. Likewise XQuery, the query language for XML data that's finally emerging from years of gestation.
At the XML Web Services One conference in Boston last month, I spent most of my allotted time in an all-day W3C/OASIS seminar on Web services security. But I couldn't help ducking out now and then in order to go next door and catch parts of Ken Holman's hands-on seminar, Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath.
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
CTO of Propylon, and previously co-founder of Digotome, Sean has served as an invited expert on W3C committees, and is a widely respected authority on XML.
Jeffrey P Shell sniffs out the real significance of Jaguar's rumored journaling file system:
If this turns out to be true, it will be very interesting: Journaling File System Layer to appear in Mac OS X 10.2.2....Of real interest - Apple did bring in Dominic Giampaolo a while ago. Giampaolo wrote BeOS's journaled BFS file system. With luck, more BFS features will find their way into Mac OS X, allowing OS X to beat Microsoft's Longhorn/Yukon projects to market. [Industrie Toulouse]
This would be a really smart move on Apple's part, whether or not an enriched file system were to beat Yukon to market. In a column a few years ago, I relayed a discussion about ReiserFS and the BeOS filesystem (BFS), two examples that advance the state of the art in a more incremental way than I expect Yukon will attempt.
It seems odd that so little progess has been made on the filesystem front, but then again, maybe not. There hasn't, until now, been the right intersection of open technology, desktop apps, and users. Apple's uniquely positioned to whip these ingredients into an innovative froth.
