The bureaucratic hurdles include security considerations, export controls, and a host of other issues that Bollers sums up as "releasability remediation."
Now called WinFS, this vision of metadata-enriched storage and query-driven retrieval was, and is, compelling. Making it real wasn't then, and isn't now, simply a matter of engineering the right data structures and APIs.
Few organizations have the resources to maintain and evolve a working system while mercilessly refactoring to produce its successor. Microsoft is among the lucky few. We'll see, in a couple of years, how well Longhorn has exploited that rare opportunity.
Developers who plug into the reputation-driven meritocracy of open source -- while advancing the goals of your business -- are a force to be reckoned with.
Documentation of GUI software needs pages of screenshots and text to describe procedures that, on the Web, are encapsulated in links that can be published, bookmarked, and e-mailed. A GUI that doesn't embrace linking can never be truly rich.
Tear open the envelope of a SOAP packet, and you'll find an XML document inside. That document, representing a business transaction in flight, lives in two worlds at the same time. To applications and services, it's an XML payload. To people, it's a document to read, annotate, and pass around. Given the novel convergence of these two modes, the browser's future as an all-purpose Internet client may be brighter than we think.
When a computer in one timezone schedules an event in another timezone, the computer doing the scheduling needs to be able to accept and display both. I'm sure programmers could solve this -- if they weren't so indignant about humanity's perversion of astronomical time.
We'll always have to manage permissions centrally. But CoreStreet's method of distributing them to the edge of the network -- and beyond -- strikes me as an excellent way to tackle a thorny logistical problem.
The methods pioneered by Oakland General Manager Billy Beane, based on the theoretical foundations laid by maverick statistician Bill James, hold important lessons for enterprise IT.
Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose that some malign force knocked all the Internet mail servers permanently offline but left everything else intact. How would we cope?
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
"His current technical interests include alternative transaction models, aspect-oriented programming, statistical modeling of distributed applications, and streaming XML"
"I'm short and I have the remnants of a southern accent," Paul says in a recent interview. Co-founder of Digital Creations, now Zope Corporation, Paul evangelizes the powerful Zope/Python combo.
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.
Jonathan Bollers, vice president and chief engineer at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), says that SAIC forks open source projects for in-house development "almost without exception." The problem is that although there is often a desire to give back, it's "a tedious process fraught with more heartache than benefits." The bureaucratic hurdles include security considerations, export controls, and a host of other issues that Bollers sums up as "releasability remediation." [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
Jonathan Bollers proposes that defense contracts might be structured to make such remediation economical for contractors, and suggests that benefits would flow to private-sector entrepeneurs. I think it's a great idea.
Of the many readers who reacted to the earlier column on the open-source give-back dilemma, Bollers was the only one willing to go on record. A similar thing happens when I write about Microsoft recently: a lot of folks agree with what I'm saying, but most prefer to remain anonymous. It's funny how both OSS and MS, each in their own ways, raise political issues that people want to talk about but are scared to talk about.
P.J.: Despite what some may think, I'm about as platform-neutral as they come. But here's the problem: There's still no agreement on how presence shall be presented as a Web service. On one side are the proponents of XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), an XML-based outgrowth of the Jabber project, which doesn't seem to be supported by anyone bigger than Novell. On the other, I see IBM and Microsoft agreeing on something for the first time since OS/2 1.0 was released: that SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)/SIMPLE (SIP Implementation for Messaging and Presence Leverage Enhancements) is the way to go. So, I'm curious, Jon: What side are you on?
Jon: Both, for different reasons, but it doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. I know several developers who are using Jabber as a SOAP transport, and I'm told that the new breed of SIP-oriented IP PBXs offers SOAP interfaces. It's not a question of whether Web services will turbocharge the next generation of collaboration, but how. And there are two big answers. First, Web services will provide a general means of access to the messaging substrates. Second, Web services will help us unify metadata (message headers, aka context) and content (message bodies, aka documents) under a common data-management discipline: XML. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
This was my first appearance in the InfoWorld Point/Counterpoint series. I was looking for an opening to deliver Dan Akroyd's immortal line: PJ, you ignorant slut. But the opportunity never arose. Until now :-)
