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.
Of course sites such as Amazon and Google have reasons to create formal APIs and gate access to them. But on an enterprise intranet the threat is disuse, not overuse. You're publishing information that you want people to find, exploit, and recombine. When it's appropriate to use SOAP and WSDL -- for example, when queries require fancy authorization or complex inputs -- then do so. But when a simpler strategy will suffice, don't be ashamed to use it. Between the primordial tag soup of HTML and the formal realm of Web services lies a large and fertile middle ground: XHTML. Information that you publish in XHTML can be directly consumed by browsers, and it's much friendlier to spiders than ill-formed HTML. If you hope people will mine your intranet, make the job as easy as it can be. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
I sometimes worry that I harp too much on these kinds of simple home truths. But Mike Champion's review of my XML 2003 keynote was a nice bit of validation:
Jon Udell gave a keynote speech on Tuesday that pierced the jaded, slightly cynical shell I've acquired after about 8 years in the XML world. He didn't talk about "maybe someday..." or "if only ...", he showed what a little imagination can do with the widely deployed XHTML, CSS, and XPath technologies today.
...
So why did this pierce my cynical shell? Most would agree that we need more metadata on the Web for it to live up to its full potential -- that's the very premise of the Semantic Web effort in which Tim Berners-Lee has invested much of the W3C's resources (and credibility). On the other hand, the historical difficulty of getting real people to put metadata in their content is believed by many to doom such efforts to failure. (Cory Doctrow's essay is the most colorful and cogent, if widely reviled, statement of this position). Udell's insight is that we can leverage the technology we have, salted by human vanity, to get usable metadata without technological breakthroughs or unrealistic demands on humans.
As Dorothea Salo recently pointed out, this isn't only my insight. I'm just one of the people who keeps on noticing, and drawing attention to, ways we can make more out of what we already have.
