It's really pleasing that finally the book REST in Practice that Savas, Ian, and I have been writing will hit bookshelves on the 24th September. We're pretty pleased that we got it out before the next ... read more.
As a member of the programme committee for the 8th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2010), I'd like to draw your attention to the call for papers. Get your thinking caps on and submit someth ... read more.
The book Savas, Ian, and I have been working on for the last few years(!) has finally made it to Amazon for pre-order (UK, US). Our publisher, O'Reilly, believe that it'll hit bookshelves around Augus ... read more.
I’m a newbie to riding in Europe, having learned to snowboard in Canada and spent most of my time riding mud and rocks in Australia and NZ. But since moving back to the UK, I’ve become a fan of snowbo ... read more.
The First International Workshop on RESTful Design, the (inflammatory-titled) WS-REST will be running alongside the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh, North Carolina on 26th April 2010. As a member of the ... read more.
Guilherme has written an interesting and thought-provoking post on the RESTEasy framework, comparing it to his own Restfulie framework. Overall I think the theme of his analysis is accurate: RESTEasy ... read more.
The slides for the REST tutorial that Ian Robinson and I gave are now online. Enjoy. ... read more.
Guilherme Silveria and Cauê Guerra have been busy. Based on some of the ideas in the book Ian, Savas, and I are writing (which focuses on Java and .NET examples), they've written a really neat framewo ... read more.
I'm super-happy to be speaking with Ian Robinson at QCon San Francisco this year. We're going to be doing a full day tutorial based on our book (tentatively titled "REST in Practice" that we're writi ... read more.
I’m going to be giving briefings in London and Manchester as part of ThougthWorks’ continuing series. This time around I’m going to talk about Web-based SOA with a talk called "The Enterprise Architec ... read more.
John Moe has written up a taxonomy of various SOA styles including Guerrilla SOA. I think John's is a useful taxonomy, I completely agree that Guerrilla SOA is preferable to Gorilla SOA. Following on ... read more.
Only 2.5 years after this .NET developer moved to London, I’ll be attending (and presenting) at my first London .NET user group. In tomorrow’s talk (registration required), I’ll be talking about hyper ... read more.
The mulit-talented Guilherme Silveira with Adriano Almeida and Lucas Cavalcanti, has been coding up a storm on the RESTful services front. Based on the Restbucks ordering example from the book Ian, Sa ... read more.
The SOA Manifesto (aka Snake Oil Agreement, or SOA) has been published, attempting to set out a value system for SOA deployments modeled on the famous (and useful) Agile manifesto. Like the Agile mani ... read more.
The (Second) International SOA Symposium is where all the serious SOA-types hang out for a few days, discussing the critical issues around ESB adoption and which vendor rollouts looks best on a CV or ... read more.
In a warm up for this year's QCon San Francisco, I'll be giving two tutorials in Denmark around the same time as the JAOO meetups (but three weeks later than the main JAOO conference). These tutorials ... read more.
Once I finish my current assignment in Bangalore, I'm spending a packed week in Europe starting with the Trifork folks (the brains behind JAOO). They've organised two meetups - one in Århus and one i ... read more.
Brilliant! My friend Anna Liu (ex-Microsoft, now University of New South Wales), got Slashdotted for her work on evaluating cloud platforms. Great work Anna, ad see you at the Aussie Architecture Foru ... read more.
Like Ian said, we'll be talking about distributed systems on the Web tomorrow. Fire up your (Microsoft-friendly) browsers and get stuck into the Live Meeting at http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet.Mainland ... read more.
Prior to last week’s excellent Falando em Java conference in São Paulo, I spent some time with the lovely folks at Caelum. They invited me to talk at their in-house tech day where I spoke about hyperm ... read more.
On the 28th May (1pm EDT) I'll be delivering a new version of my RESTful Web Services tutorial as part of the new InfoQ Virtual training events. This tutorial is based on material first given at AIIT, ... read more.
If you’re into thinking about services, and you fancy being in lovely Prague, Czech Republic on the 5th June 2009, then you might consider submitting a paper to the Workshop on the Applications of Sof ... read more.
For a number of years Mrs World Wide Webber has been using Yahoo! for email. It wasn't an educated choice, she just needed an email address when she left university and Yahoo (and others) provided tho ... read more.
Savas is blogging about an idea we've been batting around for a little while around exposing hypermedia state outside of regular resource representations. In essence the idea is that by using the Acce ... read more.
I'd just like to so thanks to you folks out there who attended my QCon tutorial on Web-based services on Monday. The session was great and you guys gave me some excellent feedback - especially around ... read more.
QCon London is fast approaching and I'm really pleased to be involved with this event for the 3rd year running. This year I'm not going to really be speaking on or hosting any tracks, but I've more se ... read more.
Like my colleague Phillip Calcado says, SOA is really like DDD at larger scale. An illuminating read indeed. ... read more.
Big thanks to everyone who came to Manchester Geek Night last week to hear me shamelessly plug my forthcoming book. The slides are now online, for your perusal at a more leisurely pace (and perhaps wi ... read more.
My friend and erstwhile colleague Jay Fields recently tweeted about the tyranny of "should" in unit testing. To paraphrase Jay, he's suggesting that test names are simply comments and as such don't ad ... read more.
In my previous post I talked about how unit tests aren't born tests, but are a design aid which turn into tests as the components they shape mature. But testing doesn't stop at driving out good, decou ... read more.
In the course of my work, I get to spend time with people who have different points of view on software development compared to my own, and indeed compared to those of my colleagues at ThoughtWorks (w ... read more.
I've just read an article by one of your guys with an unfeasibly long title that says your ribbon is going to become pervasive within Windows 7. I'd like to plead with you not to let that happen beca ... read more.
Savas is reaching out to the lazy Web asking for the origins of the terms "Infrastructure as a Service," "Platform as a Service," and "Software as a Service" in the context of cloud computing. Does an ... read more.
My friend and colleague Pat Fornasier (he of Soya fame) has recently been on a trip round South America. On Christmas Eve, I got this through the door which really tickled me - thanks mate!The fight c ... read more.
At home I use Devolo Ethernet-over-Poweline devices for streaming media around the place. Until now I've only have two devices (both 200 AVs from a starter pack), but in a little network shake-up owni ... read more.
Here are my raw, unedited notes from Stu Charlton's QCon San Francisco 2008 talk. - Challenge is applying REST to enterprises - enterprises haven't figured it out yet, particularly since they're in th ... read more.
Here are my raw, unedited notes from Leonard Richardson's QCon San Francisco 2008 talk.- Advocating for a RESTful approach induces people to think you're crazy! - Many application protocols in use o ... read more.
Here are my raw, unedited notes from Steve Vinoski's QCon San Francisco 2008 talk.- Got into REST around 2001/2002 because of Mark Baker - Erlang overview - functional, concurrent, distributed, focu ... read more.
Here are my raw, unedited notes from Ian Robinsons' QCon San Francisco 2008 talk, scribed by the wonderful Ken Kolchier since Ian was doing his presentation on my laptop...fictional example as repres ... read more.
Here are my raw, unedited notes from Mark Nottingham's QCon San Francisco 2008 talk. - Protocols are hard, and if you don't understand them you'll repeat the mistakes of the past. - Goal is to teac ... read more.
The QCon REST track, as many of the speaker and attendees have blogged, was simply excellent, not a single dud talk all day. Having said that, there were three stand-out themes that emerged for me dur ... read more.
Finally* the article that Savas, Ian, and I wrote for InfoQ has been published. This is a piece we've derived from the work we're doing for our forthcoming book, and lays out where we think integratio ... read more.
This year I learned a lovely sound bite from Steve Vinoski, which he attributed to John Maynard Keynes, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" This was brought to my mind b ... read more.
After a write-off day yesterday, today was really great. After an initial short flight scraping around for lift, I took a second flight and got 1000m above launch with a mixture of dynamic and thermal ... read more.
Yesterday was a good reintroduction to the skies with three cruisy top-to-bottom flights before the weather conspired against us.Today was a different kettle of fish altogether. Although the day start ... read more.
The JAOO/InfoQ love fest returns to San Francisco for the second year running. This time around I'm picking up the mantel from Stefan Tilkov and running the (unashamedly) Web integration track (which ... read more.
In the Web space I'm really pleased to be involved with the first Enterprise Web Conference which will be happening in New York City and London this year on the 28th and 30th October respectively. Bot ... read more.
This is a head's up for the first SOA Symposium that's happening in Amsterdam in October. I can't help but wonder at the irony of holding a conference for SOA in the Netherlands, where that particular ... read more.
No, this isn't about test frameworks though you could be forgiven for thinking so given who I work for. Instead after a year out of the skies (snowboarding rather than flying) I'm back in the harness ... read more.
As well as the declaring myself a Web over REST kind of guy at this year's JavaZone, I also saw a couple of other things that I really liked. The first of these was Arjen Poutsma's standing-room only ... read more.
These are troubling times for global finance. On Monday morning I awoke to Radio 4 saying that the top brass at Lehman Brothers had failed to secure the bank's future and left the building and climbed ... read more.
During my talk at JavaZone, I discussed Web-centric approaches for doing the Guerrilla SOA thing. I took a principled stand on it really, saying that I was deliberately going to be a Web proponent rat ... read more.
The blog's been quiet lately while I've been absorbed in some interesting high performance computing work (which I hope to blog about later). In the meantime I've tweaked around the edges of my Web pr ... read more.
In this month's HBR, there's a great article by Ric Merrifield, Jack Calhoun, and Dennis Stevens called "The Next Revolution in Productivity" which I think resonates strongly with the Guerrilla SOA ap ... read more.
Like everybody else on the planet or in near-Earth orbit I followed the Apple WWDC bandwagon avidly this week. No doubt the rest of the universe will get on the same bandwagon in various numbers of li ... read more.
While I was talking about protocol-centric integration and incremental SOA at last year's DevSummit in Stockholm, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen interviewed me. I've still got a face for radio (and an accent for ... read more.
A couple of months back I was asked for some comments on the notion that the Internet is becoming an operating system. I actually think it's becoming more like Middleware (the Web) and useful componen ... read more.
Earlier this year Martin and I did one of the keynote addresses at QCon London. Ostensibly our talk was on lightweight SOA-ish things, charting a course through the twin perils of stovepipe architectu ... read more.
My goodness, if that isn't quite a mouthful. Nonetheless there's an interesting workshop happening at this year's OOPSLA conference in Nashville. A workshop inviting people who are building services t ... read more.
After a fairly reasonable flight from London (I can't believe that I can find 23 hour flights reasonable nowadays) I arrived in Sydney to attend and present at the Australian Architecture Forum. The t ... read more.
A monumental day for all of us who suffer from Lotus Notes (my symptoms began 3.5 years ago). Mark the 13th May in your Notes calendar (hah!) and take action![Via Simon Brunning] ... read more.
ECOWS 2008: The 6th European Conference on Web Services, November 12-14, 2008 in Dublin, Ireland http://www.computing.dcu.ie/ecows08The European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) is the premier confe ... read more.
I got a referral to my blog from a Google query a few weeks ago which made me chuckle. Then a couple of days ago I got a few more and I felt I just had to figure out what was so wrong about Guerrilla ... read more.
A few weeks back Carl and Richard from DNR got in touch wanting to talk about the whole Guerrilla SOA thing, the episode's online now so clap your ears around my delicious Black Country accent... ... read more.
I liked this thought provoking piece from the newly resurrected Andrew Townley. Now couldn't we usefully use a contract language that describes hypermedia? I wonder who could be skunk-working on that. ... read more.
I just upgraded Remote Desktop for Mac client from beta 2 to beta 3, at which point I was unable to see most of my mac home directory on the remote Windows machine (only ~/library in fact). A quick do ... read more.
2008 Middleware for Web Services (MWS 2008) Workshop held at the EDOC 2008 conference in Munich, GermanyWeb site:http://www.greenpea.net/mws/mws2008/index.htmlPapers due: 13 June 2008 About the Worksh ... read more.
Much of contemporary SOA thinking is centered around the notion of very loose coupling. So thinking goes, tight coupling leads to nasty brittle enterprise systems which resist change and over time bec ... read more.
I was in downtown Calgary this Saturday looking for books to fill a flight back to the UK, and what do I see but this fabulous sign at the entrance to McNally Robinson:Following in a tradition I belie ... read more.
A few weeks back a handful of ThoughtWorks' senior techies met for our quarterly CTO office meeting in fabulous San Francisco. Since this is one of those rare opportunities where we actually see one-a ... read more.
My friend, colleague, and current co-author Ian Robinson has finally gone online. He's starting his foray into blogging with a retrospective on consumer-driven contracts for SOA.If you're so inclined, ... read more.
The meme of the conference for me came from the keynote talk I did with Martin Fowler. The middleware vendors aren't giving us big powerful software as they think, but instead of proffering big flabby ... read more.
After my plaintiff whinge about support for appointments that start and end in different time zones (i.e. flights!), I was pleased that Outlook 2007 provided this support. Now I've transitioned myself ... read more.
My second "contribution" to QCon after embarrassing Martin will be on Stefan's SOA track. I thought this track was especially strong in San Francisco last year, but I am optimistic it will be just as ... read more.
This year's first QCon is rapidly approaching. I'm going to be presenting one of the keynotes with my friend and ThoughtWorks colleague Martin Fowler, called something like "Does my Bus look big in th ... read more.
So if you've got your modem working on OSX now you'll want to get it running under Windows Vista on bootcamp, if you're still bootcamping that is.Understand that I am much more familiar with Windows t ... read more.
I've been in Canada on and off since before Christmas working on some interesting large-scale network systems. Since I'm mobile a fair amount I've been trying to get my hands on a wireless broadband c ... read more.
Back in 2005 I delivered one of the early technical briefings for ThoughtWorks in Australia. That was when the Guerrilla SOA meme was unleashed like plague of cane toads on an unsuspecting nation.Now ... read more.
Stefan just let me know that my Guerrilla SOA presentation from last year's QCon is now online at InfoQ.La lucha continua! ... read more.
Just add a dash of Lotus Notes. Eurgh!Update: Ubuntu is about to get a dash of total-lameness too. ... read more.
Ganesh's blog leads me to a completely weird discussion on Stefan's blog on the value of hyperlinks outside of the browser web. Stefan argues that AtomPub is a good example of how links are used to de ... read more.
Well clearly the big iron SOA vendors are unsettled, especially now they've started name calling.Still if Chimpanzee SOA is what it's time for, as Miko proclaims, then we might all just swing for it. ... read more.
I'm with Erik Meijer in his Øredev workshop on Linq. We're going through the motions with C# 3.0 at the moment, and I've found my first bug, or at least something which Erik believes is inconsistent w ... read more.
I'm at Øredev in Mälmo this week doing the Guerrilla SOA thing. Turns out our sensible Scandinavian friends are pretty switched onto that meme.Yesterday evening's speaker dinner (and subsequent beer-a ... read more.
I have such a lot of sympathy with the latest Apple Microsoft-bashing. My Vista laptop was stolen a few months back (the b*stards!) and my IS guys gave me an old Dell D610 laptop with XP installed. No ... read more.
So many times when I've attended conferences with "SOA" in the agenda have I been disappointed by the sheer amount of "blah blah blah" that has crept into the content. This year's second QCon conferen ... read more.
While I was at QCon, I filled in on a slot on the architecture track to talk about Guerrilla SOA. Michael Nygard (of "Release It!" fame) perhaps nailed it best at the QCon party the night before the t ... read more.
I'm at QCon in San Francisco sitting on the SOA track. Right now Steve Vinoski's giving his excellent "REST Eye for the SOA Guy" talk and he's pressing what SOA does not mean. He's given us these abso ... read more.
In the aftermath of the Guerrilla SOA episode, I'm taking the fight to the good people of Malmo, Sweden at this year's Øredev conference. Looking at the architecture track it seems there's a good amou ... read more.
I'll be giving two talks at QCon in San Francisco in November, one on the architecture track and one on the SOA track:Guerrilla SOA - How to fight back when a vendor tries to take control of your ente ... read more.
Well, well, if that little chat Stefan and I had on Guerrilla SOA didn't go and quite a stir (though mostly positive) out there in the bloggy bits of the Web. I think it might be time for ... read more.
Observation: the people with the poorest musical taste own the leakiest earphones.Second observation: those same people don't understand signal clipping, or don't care.Extrapolation: public transport ... read more.
Over at IBM, Bobby Woolf is talking about ESB-oriented architecture as the wrong way to adopt SOA. Apart from Bobby's kindlier approach towards ESBs, this is very much Guerrilla SOA thinking and very ... read more.
As Stefan points out, at QCon London this year, he interviewed me about my Guerilla SOA meme (and a little of that "Web integration" stuff too). The resulting interview has just been published on Info ... read more.
A while ago I blogged about the poor networking support on my XPS m1210 laptop. Since then I've installed Vista on that machine and have watched the performance go from reasonable to abysmal with no r ... read more.
My two TechEd talks are now on the Web. Checkout my presentations page, or go directly to the source:Stranger in a Strange Land (the REST-y talk)Learning to Live with the Static Typing Fascist and Dyn ... read more.
...killnotes.exeThe integration between Outlook 2007 and Domino via IBM's DAMO is even worse than with Outlook 2003 and the Microsoft connector. Problems with this setup are:Meeting requests - Outlook ... read more.
James Crisp and I will be giving our talk comparing the virtues of Ruby and C# 3.0 on Tuesday 13th August in Crowne Plaza Ballroom 2. See you there! ... read more.
My talk which used to be called "Using the Web to Build Connected Systems" (boring!) is now called "Stranger in a Strange Land" and will be on at 9am on Wednesday 14th August in Sky City NZ Room 1.See ... read more.
My real reason for coming down-under this year wasn't just for the snowboarding (though I confess Phil and I had a great powder day at Fall's Creek yesterday), but to talk at TechEd in Australia and N ... read more.
My friend and colleague from ThoughtWorks Australia Dr Scott Shaw is giving the next Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney and Melbourne.Scott's a geek at heart (though he has a management day job) ... read more.
I've somehow managed to find my way back to Sydney en-route to TechEd Australia/New Zealand in the next couple of weeks - yay! While I'm here I wanted to hang out with the good people at the Sydney We ... read more.
Steve Loughran says it as it is: WSDL is evil. If WS-* is doomed to a miserable end as an also-ran, then I'm with Steve: it's mostly WSDL's fault.WSDL is a turd, and the vendor community has spent hal ... read more.
I'm sitting in a Starbuck's just off Times Square, sipping a latte and working on one of the later chapters of our new book on Web-friendly distributed systems – the chapter that compares message-orie ... read more.
I'm back in New York city for a few weeks for some work stuff. Coming back here was a late notice kind of thing, so booking a hotel for my stay was a priority since it's peak season here, so I decide ... read more.
Alan Kay: Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.Counter example: Lotus Notes. And Lotus Notes. ... read more.
So WSDL 2.0 is finally (and boy do I mean finally) a recommendation.The bullying and name-calling from the RESTafarian jihad over the years (yes it took years) has clearly had an impact with all mann ... read more.
Since WWW2007 I've been contemplating the Semantic Web vision as supported by various W3C activities, and I've also been thinking about the kind of programmatic Web that a fence-sitting MESTian/RESTaf ... read more.
2007 Middleware for Web Services (MWS 2007) Workshop (http://www.greenpea.net/mws/)Held on Monday, October 15, 2007 at the EDOC 2007 conference in Annapolis, Maryland, USA (http://edoc.mitre.org/)Work ... read more.
My colleague Mark McNeill asks whether we're building potatoes or sensations. I defy the Agile (that's capital "A" there) community to re-think their notions of YAGNI and simplicity. I'm not going to ... read more.
I don't often blog about my employer, because a lot of the day-to-day work we do is shrouded in all manner of client confidential legal shielding. Besides many of my colleagues do a fine job of keepin ... read more.
I'm working in New York for a while doing some reasonably interesting things with low-latency/high scalability service-oriented systems, which means the day job's pretty good right now. It also gives ... read more.
3rd International Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications:Analysis, Design, and Composition (WESOA'07)In conjunction with the 5th Int. Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 200 ... read more.
My friend Patric Fornasier will be presenting to the ACS Web Services SIG in Sydney on his work on Soya (a sensible WCF-based metadata stack and runtime) and SSDL (an equally sensible contract descrip ... read more.
There's a craze going on all over the web with people playing lottery numbers or something. I don't really understand it, but I think if your web site gets spotted with the right numbers on, then you ... read more.
As a member of the Program Committee, I'd like to draw your attention to the ICSOC 2007 Call for Papers: Fifth International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2007) Vienna, Austria Septe ... read more.
The ZX Spectrum is a piece of computing history. It's all fiddly rubber keys and playing with the tone control on your mono tape recorder to get dubiously named games to load (anyone remember Penetrat ... read more.
Having lived in Sydney for a good few years I really got into drinking good coffee. One reason was definitely because Aussies can't do a decent cuppa tea (yeah, you blokes know it's true), but the mai ... read more.
... that his personal email and blog site will be down for a week or so while he continues his domain name migration. You know the drill, get to him via his corporate affiliation, other hotmail addres ... read more.
An anonymous colleague just came out with this piece of genius on ThoughtWorks and FowlBots at QCon:"State your designation.""I am 7 of Martin."Classic. ... read more.
Yesterday was the second day of QCon, where a number of tracks were running in parallel. I hung out on the SOA track hosted by Stefan Tilkov, who has written a brief set of notes on the proceedings.Al ... read more.
Today is the first day of QCon 2007, and over the last few days there have been a good number of smart people kicking around London under the QCon banner. Yesterday evening I went to dinner along with ... read more.
After several months of development iterations and research work, Patric Fornasier's excellent Soya SSDL engine has been released as an open source project.Soya implements SSDL on top of WCF giving de ... read more.
The last few days have been great. Not only did we spend a couple of nice days seeing Vancouver's sights (and not shying away from its eats and drinks either) but now we're staying on Blackcomb mounta ... read more.
Today's our last full day in New Zealand so we had a cruisy day around BroTown (aka Auckland), after a decent espresso coffee in the downtown area, we headed up to Auckland's tallest landmark (and sce ... read more.
After the calm temperate waters of the Poor Knight's Island, where better to spend a few days warming up than the Bay of Islands?The last couple of days have been spent lazing round on catamarans, dri ... read more.
OK, so it's true that I am a complete dive-wuss. I really like diving in tropical waters and have dived in temperate or cold waters very infrequently after an event in the north sea where I froze my n ... read more.
After Wellington we headed to the picturesque lakeside town of Taupo, our base for a few days as we aimed to walk the Tongariro crossing one of the best day hikes in New Zealand weighing in at 17km wi ... read more.
Well we finally made it across the Cook Straight between the north and south island. Fortunately for us it was a very calm day in the straight because we both strangely lack sea legs even after a deca ... read more.
The Abel Tasman National Park is in the north west of the South island, and is a picturesque costal forest stretching from Maharu in the south to Separation Point in the north. We decided to walk the ... read more.
After driving over the Lewis Pass onto the East side of the island, we spent a day lazing in the hot waters of Hamner Springs. The following day we were up early to drive out to the east coast town of ... read more.
Well another day, another glacier. This time the Franz Josef Glacier on the West Coast of New Zealand's south island. This time instead of hiking up to the glacier as we did at Rob Roy in Wanaka, we ... read more.
Today was my first wedding anniversary. So obviously I couldn't do anything naughty like sneak off flying. Instead we planned to walk to the (relatively) nearby Rob Roy Glacier.After driving out throu ... read more.
OK so with the New Zealand Nationals (paragliding competition) happening at the local ski mountain (Treble Cone), I don't fancy queuing to launch behind 70-odd competition pilots. So instead I headed ... read more.
It occurred to me that I hadn't flown at all this year (ok, it is New Year's day!), so once again to the Flight park. Today was the fun stuff - refining thermalling techniques and some more interestin ... read more.
I'm told that Kiwi birds are flightless. This is patently untrue if you'd ever met Lisa from Extreme Air in Queenstown. I spent the day refining some launch and landing techniques under her tutelage a ... read more.
Today is my youngest sister's 19th birthday. Happy Birthday sis!This morning I gave the local paragliding school a call to see if I could hitch a lift with them, but the weather isn't playing ball. If ... read more.
After a brief overnight stop in Christchurch we arrived in Queenstown. We've been here every ski season since we moved down under and were looking forward to seeing what Queenstown has to offer during ... read more.
I've been living in Sydney for three years now. It's a wonderful city with stunning surroundings and a relatively laid back lifestyle for a medium sized city. Over the time I've made some good friends ... read more.
Though I'm often thought of as a grumpy guy, I generally try to do the right thing in my day-to-day life. I don't murder people, I try to be calm and pleasant to my fellow humans. I don't steal or com ... read more.
Over on his blog "Roads to SOA" Ronan Bradley writes: "The largest components of the software spend was on ESBs and security (both at 24% of that 40% of total). This suggests that the ESB has been rec ... read more.
I'm giving a talk on message-oriented Web Services tomorrow night at the ACS Web Services SIG in Sydney. So put your .Net caps on and come along to marvel at WCF (not WSE as the web site says) being u ... read more.
I recently bought (and with my own money) a Dell XPS M1210. After being bitten by Dell's shoddy customer service in 2000, I swore I'd never buy one again. But alas the M1210 hits all of my buttons - i ... read more.
Reuse is good. Use is better. (unknown)There's been a lot of debate on service re-use in amongst the SOA bloggers and Javier has a written good roundup.Personally I'm intrigued by the notion of servic ... read more.
The IEEE Services Computing contest was held as part of SCC 2006 in Chicago. I am really pleased to say the Newcastle University team (plus the odd ringer or two) took first place in the competition. ... read more.
The Enterprise Java Australia people are holding the EJA Industry Forum on the 18th and 19th October in Melbourne and Sydney respectively.The speaker line up looks very strong indeed including Sun's S ... read more.
CALL FOR PAPERSSixteenth International World Wide Web Conference Web Services TrackBanff, Alberta, Canadahttp://www2007.orgMay 8-12, 2007The Web Services track of WWW2007 seeks original papers describ ... read more.
Following on from last year's highly successful WESOA'05, WESOA'06 is to once again be held in conjunction with ICSOC in Chicago in December. The call for papers has recently been extended, and the pr ... read more.
My home workstation died a couple of weeks back. As a consequence I've had to move some files around onto my laptop and backup laptop, and move files from the laptops onto an external USB drive. No bi ... read more.
I just delivered my Tech Ed New Zealand talk on Guerrilla SOA (you can see the same antics from a previous talk if you're keen). The room was packed out with standing room only which at least meant at ... read more.
Yesterday finished off pretty well. I attended a fun session on PowerShell given by Kirk Jackson who was in good form. Slightly risqué, in places and very amusing. For a topic that could have been qui ... read more.
So here I am in Auckland, New Zealand for Microsoft's sell-out (as in fully booked, rather than lacking credibility!) TechEd conference. Tomorrow I'm presenting my "Guerrilla SOA" presentation on incr ... read more.
Today I received a referral to my blog from a Google query asking "can java support ssdl". The answer, of course, is an emphatic "yes" if someone would get round to actually building some tools (shame ... read more.
Update: fixed dodgy formattingA few days back, Savas blogged about the Newcastle University team that entered the IEEE Service-Oriented Computing Contest with a cool service-oriented system designed t ... read more.
It's been a while since I've been to a TechEd event. When I lived in the UK I managed to attend a few TechEds in the US and Europe and always had an absolute blast (especially with my co-attendees Sav ... read more.
I was reading the comments in Stefan's recent write-up on the various supporters of REST and WS-*. Mark Baker fights hard to put me (correctly) as a supporter of both (or at least as someone who appre ... read more.
I've been getting quite a lot of trackback spam lately, and I haven't had time to finish writing my spam checker module to deal with it (day job keeps me far too busy at the moment). To free up the Sa ... read more.
… these alternative Mac adverts ring too true. ... read more.
The 4th European Conference on Web Services is happening in Zurich from the 4th-6th December 2006. As a member of the programme committee it's my duty to point you towards the call for papers.Now what ... read more.
No, this isn't about whether you should be doing Ruby or Lisp or Scheme (of course you're already doing all of those fluently, right?), but more a point of a problem for native English speakers like m ... read more.
If you come to a talk I'm giving for the ACS Service-Oriented Computing SIG in Melbourne there are guaranteed light refreshments!Come hear me blather on about service-oriented patterns and anti-patter ... read more.
Via Anna, my drinking buddy Ian Gorton's latest book is about to come onto the market.Ian is an awesome software thinker, and this book will be an absolute winner. Pre-order yourselves a copy at Amazo ... read more.
I'm on honeymoon in Whistler, BC after having met up with my wife in Hong Kong after the MS talks. The snow is still excellent up high, and the amount of terrain here compared to Australia is just cra ... read more.
John CJresponds to Don's response to Tim for help on spending 100 engineering dollars on all things RESTish in the big blue house. Of those $100 he says:$5 on tool support of SSDL. OK, I'm cheating he ... read more.
There's a lot of blog traffic (and a high degree of email traffic too) about Grady Booch's recent article, much of it highly complimentary. Grady is clearly a far smarter monkey than most and has a bi ... read more.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (well ok, in northernEngland), a group of Rebel scum (i.e. Savas, Paul, Thomas, and me) wrote a paper whose purpose was to demonstrate that all the "spe ... read more.
..in having some *ahem* issues with WC. I came across John Cavnar-Johnson after Googling my latest Indigo angst. In one particularly splendid posting John says:At the heart of the internal model of In ... read more.
OK, it's gotten to the point where I have to object! I first heard from Gartner now Gregor that EDA is the next big thing after SOA.Well, EDA is different to SOA only if you've completely misundersto ... read more.
ThoughtWorks (full disclosure: my employer) and Microsoft are hosting an interop event in Hong Kong on the 23rd March. My colleague John Sullivan will be talking about all manner of Java and .Net inte ... read more.
... with this pro-ESB sentiment from BEA.There are so many things wrong with this piece, but I'll pick up on a few that really pushed my rant button (I do have one of those, it's next to my rarely use ... read more.
Udi says:"I'm wondering what's going on with SSDL2 which Google has barely heard about."There is a reason that Google knows nothing about SSDL2: there is no SSDL2. However you can see what's going on ... read more.
The International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management are hosting a special edition on Middleware for Web Services (edited by Aad van Moorsel, Raymond Wong, and Vladimir Tosic). As ... read more.
I can't believe it, but Phil is selling the acutal Shroud of Cartman sofa.If you're in the Melbourne area and want a piece of religious history to park your backside on, then put in a bid - who knows ... read more.
I caught up with Mark Baker on Saturday night, physically for the first time, in the Rocks area overlooking Sydney harbour.We executed a GET on numerous food and beer resources and got HTTP 200 from a ... read more.
Since our recent IEEE Internet Computing article on SSDL, there's been renewed interest from the community in the ideas. One thing that I've found helps folks to understand SSDL is to couch it in ... read more.
For so long now I have happily taunted Mark B. about how I love to tunnel my own favourite architectural style and application protocol over his favoured architectual style and beloved application pro ... read more.
I'm giving two talks in the Sydney area in February which might be of interest to Web Services geeks out there:First up, on Wednesday 1st February I'm giving a talk called "Guerilla SOA" on how SOAP a ... read more.
Savas and I have had our tutorial accepted to ASWEC 2006. We had originally planned to present a WSE version of this tutorial at WWW2005, but it was a no-go because we didn't get enough attend ... read more.
The paper that Savas, Simon, Dean, Paul, and I wrote is now online at the IEEE Internet Computing Web Site. It covers all the SSDL goodness that you can shake a stick at, all in ruthlessly clear IEEE ... read more.
Today has been one of those fantastic days that you sometimes happen upon. Everything seems to have gone fabulously, right from the start.First up, out of bed ridiculously early to be greeted by a typ ... read more.
IBM Research kindly offered to publish the proceedings for the WDSOA'05 workshop as part of their series of research notes.Initial feedback has been positive, and who knows there may even be a second ... read more.
...but what kind of animal is a Service Data Object? Seriously - like Don says, "Get over your OO obsession." ... read more.
Anna's chairing the Industry Track of ASWEC 2006. As a dutiful member of her programme committee, I'm sharing the CFP:Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) Call For Industry Report Submis ... read more.
Roy Fielding, unwitting MESTian that he is, was minuted as saying "I have no advice other than to say that they [WS-Addressing EPRs] are doomed to failure."Gee, object pointers on the Web won't work? ... read more.
The WDSOA'05 http://elab.njit.edu/wdsoa05 Workshop will be taking place later this year alongside ICSOC 2005. If you're going to be attending ICSOC, then I'd like to encourage you to a ... read more.
You might have not noticed, but in my spare time I am an avid (albeit distinctly amateur) paraglider pilot. I was thrilled today that for the first time in about four months I was finally able to take ... read more.
I've never really used my blog to gripe about bad customer service before, but this last week Easyspace.com have driven me to distraction. Months ago I paid for the renewal of jim.webber.name and ever ... read more.
I found this IBM-sponsored article on Web Services C/AT/BA interesting. Not so much the content (which is fine), but the fact that it's all running with Arjuna's not IBM's software[*].I'm not quite su ... read more.
The Savster reminds us all that WSRF is at its second public review stage. While I wouldn't wish this stuff on any of you good readers, it would be helpful to the cause of Internet computing as a whol ... read more.
Thomas Erl writes in Web Services Journal on the Principles of Service Orientation. What I really liked his expansion on the core four tenets of service-oriented computing and that fact that he is one ... read more.
Markpoints to an interesting exchange at the W3C Tag Call, where Roy (Fielding) states:"I don't find any technology that doesn't use the Web to be a useful product of the W3C."Oddly enough, I agree wi ... read more.
I'm on the PC for the XML Web Services track of WWW 2006, and like the other PC members have been asked to distribue the CFP. If you've done something interesting and vaguely Web-ish, then WWW 2006 is ... read more.
Via Chris, the beginning of the end for multiple competing Web Services transaction standards:http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/members/200510/msg00000.htmlOne sincere hope I have is that WS-Coordi ... read more.
Ted Neward cuts through the hype with this fabulous piece on the C# 3.0 language features. The thing I really liked about this piece is that Ted's targeted Java developers - those folks who are bound ... read more.
Josh has written an excellent piece on how REST has been misunderstood as XML over HTTP based in Ian Foster's paper about how many ways there are to model state (Ian says 1, I say if you're explicitly ... read more.
It's really quite sad that my colleague Rebecca Parsons had to write this excellent article in the latest edition of IEEE Software on why architects should be part of development teams. An absolute mu ... read more.
The next event in the ongoing ThoughtWorks Quarterly Technology Briefings is happening on the 11th October in Sydney and the 13th October in Melbourne. I'm going to be speaking about how SOAP (the lov ... read more.
I caught up (physically) with Mark Potts (where's your blog gone?) for the first time in about three years last night. We had some fine Italian food down on Stanley Street and a few beers while talkin ... read more.
Reading the BBC News site today, I was alarmed to see that:The highest unemployment rate [of last year's university and HE output], at 11%, was for computer science.Given the UK's unemployment figures ... read more.
Like Stefan says:I no longer believe that the WS-* stack can be mapped cleanly to the Web Architecture (read: REST/HTTP); if you’re going down the WS-* road, you just have to view HTTP as a tr ... read more.
It's been a while since we've had a good old-fashioned dust-up from the Web Services suck pantomime (hint: oh no they don't). Mark (who else?) writes:The concept of a "SOAP binding" is prima facie bro ... read more.
My co-author Sandeep just told me that our book Developing Enterprise Web Services is due to be released in Korea this month. He sent me the cover and I'm stoked to see it, even thought I can't unders ... read more.
The ACS Web Services SIG is heading into its spring session, continuing with a talk I'm giving on SSDL on the 7th September.I haven't been able to get to many meetings this winter (yes - it's winter d ... read more.
To be held as part of ICSOC on December 12th 2005, in Amsterdam. Web Site http://elab.njit.edu/wdsoa05 Objectives The transition towards service-oriented computing necessitates re-eval ... read more.
Via Lindsay, I've set up a guestmap. This is a cool Google Earth based application where you can drop a pin onto your location and leave a message for others to see. It would be nice to know who's lis ... read more.
I see via Arnaud that Thomas has finally gotten round to blogging about messaging and daily life in the Alps. Kind of like Heidi with a Ph.D. in parallel computing. There are however two fatal flaws i ... read more.
Savas and I have a paper in Microsoft Architect Journal 5 on Web Services and High-Performance computing. Plenty of MESTian goodness and not a single mention of the dreaded WS-RF either.Coincidentally ... read more.
There is only one way to finish thisdebate: googlefightEnd of thread. ... read more.
In the latest issue of the ZeroC newsletter Marc Laukien picks up the baton for binary protocol performance over XML/SOAP in an article rhetorically called "Why Smart People Defend Bad Standards." The ... read more.
OK, sorry for the false blog entries about Einstein. My piece in answer to Michi and Marc on SOAP performance is coming soon. Just had a few false starts in getting it up to my blog server. ... read more.
Yesterday came the end of an era for me. My @newcastle.ac.uk email address stopped working after my affiliation with Newcastle University came to an end. That address was my first email address, was a ... read more.
I'm back in China again after two weeks being home in Sydney. I'm typing this from Hong Kong airport, and for the first time I'm here during the daytime and can actually see a little bit of the ... read more.
Some weeks after paying a mysterious visit to the Seattle area, Savas is moving to the Distributed Systems Group at Microsoft. This is a supremely good piece of news, I only hope the Microsofties have ... read more.
Christian brings up Michi's well respected ICE in a recent posting. He quotes from ZeroC's web site:"Ice shines where technologies such as SOAP or XML-RPC are too slow, or do not provide sufficient sc ... read more.
My mate Phil has started blogging about his wireless media streaming obsession. Now there are gems in there for any of us wanting to stream the latest Dr Who direct from Bittorrent to plasma screen, b ... read more.
It's been some time since I last blogged. Partially this is down to a lot of work and travel in China working with some very interesting clients on large-scale Web Services applications. Needless to s ... read more.
I'm in Shanghai for a while helping a client of ours help a client of theirs to migrate their systems towards an SOA. While that work is interesting, it's not really something I can blog about, though ... read more.
Last week I attended at workshop organised by Alan Fekete at the University of Sydney on Web-based Enterprise Information Systems which was an absolute blast. I heard a number of great talks and spoke ... read more.
Dion's post (via Stefan) is good from a taxonomical point of view. However, I utterly disagree with his assertion that SSDL is complex since people are writing it by hand (can your SDL do that?). Whil ... read more.
...baggiesbaggies! ... read more.
Stefan, in his ever ongoing quest to discover yet more alternatives to WSDL, comes across the REstful SErvices DEscription LAnguage. Interesting I think, but not as powerful as everybody's favourite W ... read more.
In my latest piece over at WebServices.org, I'm being a little controversial. The essence of this piece is that contract first development will suck if your contract language also sucks (yes WSDL, thi ... read more.
At first we had WSDL, then SSDL, then NSDL, and some more WSDL (real soon now). Now Tim Bray has published Simple Message Exchange-Description, SMEX-D.This is encouraging that others are finding that ... read more.
A replacement set of Sony Fontopia headphones arrived yesterday for the set that I'd had for the last year and a half. The difference between these headphones and the various out-of-ear stop-gap measu ... read more.
...then here is a neat pattern from Bill Wagner. ... read more.
MESTians take heart! Rockyso very clearly gets it.I was working with some people today who also really get it. It has been a long but most excellent day. ... read more.
Some in the Grid community no doubt lament Savas' return from the Greek military and subsequent re-engagement with Internet-scale computing. The paper we wrote with Paul and Thomas that started the gr ... read more.
I'm on the Programme Committee for the European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) 2005, and have been asked to distribute the CFP. Rather than spamming mailing lists and newsgroups, I thought I'd jus ... read more.
Via Savas and Dilip, there's a party going on at Steve's blog and everyone's invited. Steve remarks that the the interceptor architecture in his company's product line is based on very uniform interfa ... read more.
Mark's comment to my last post got me thinking about REST and MEST again*. Let's set a couple of things straight here:REST - Maintains that the distributed hypermedia model as exemplified by the WWW i ... read more.
From KennyW, some probably unintentional MESTian goodness. The notion of a "message object" really pushes my buttons since it's a pattern that Savas and I have been pushing hard for a while.[Yes it ha ... read more.
Via Mark and others, what Leader am I? What Famous Leader Are You?personality tests by similarminds.com(Like Mark I also took the test twice. Don't believe the intellectual part, but at least ... read more.
Via Stefan, another Web Services description language (NSDL) by Norm Walsh. Simpler than both WSDL and even SSDL I think, but like WSDL doesn't seem to support protocols, only individual request-respo ... read more.
I'm catching up with some mail after my trip to Beijing, and I came across this message to the WS-Addressing WG from Glen Daniels. It was good of Glen to bring this to the collective attention of the ... read more.
For the second week in a row, I've been hanging out with the Microsoft architecture people. First was the Gold Coast the week before last where I talked on Web Services transactions, and last week whe ... read more.
Earlier this week I attended the Microsoft Architect Forum on the Gold Coast in Queensland, where I gave two sessions on Web Services transactions (bothflavours, of course). The first session was grea ... read more.
One of the things that people (like Stefan and Jacek) seem to have picked up on in SSDL is the fact you can describe headers. This was a source of debate within the SSDL author group too. The general ... read more.
After some months of relatively head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of work, the fruits of our collective labours are ready for public consumption. The SSDL suite of specifications are ready for co ... read more.
Steveblogs on isomorphism in distributed systems. He cites the Needham and Lauer paper which (in the context of operating systems) makes the argument that message-passing and RPC are equivalent mechan ... read more.
Savas, Chris, Jacek have a side-threadgoing about MEST and message-passing (ignore the pub/sub thing, that's a different matter). What's been most interesting about these threads have been the comment ... read more.
There are lotsandlots of posts about MEST lately. Savas has done some super work in evangelising the MEST architectural style and though our recent paper was rebuffed, it seems that MEST is starting t ... read more.
In his latest column, Roger Sessions of ObjectWatch discusses the differences between objects, components, and services. Roger's writing is usually very insightful, but I can't help feeling he misses ... read more.
Arnaud Simon, Arjuna's messaging wizzard has started a shiny new blog (bienvenue mon ami). Meanwhile, Arjuna's Mark Little has kicked off his column on WebServices.org with a smart piece on the compet ... read more.
As Mark points out, the WS-A WG is making fantastic progress and by dropping refProps leaves only refParams as the last irritant in the spec.However I disagree with Mark's implicit assertion that ... read more.
With the recent completion of the WS-GAF project, it is time for me to move on to pastures new. As Savas points out in this posting WS-GAF was a pretty successful project, and it was good fun to work ... read more.
From the 15th-17th March, Ark Group Asia are running a conference on "Planning and Implementing SOA" in Sydney. I'll be delivering one of the sessions on patterns for dependable service-based computin ... read more.
I've just finished moving house. Thanks to the wonders of the Web, an awful lot of drudgery has been taken out of this process - just pop your new details in a Web form and things get switched over fr ... read more.
Now wouldn't something like Cw chords on steriods be useful in a new (carefully capitalised) Web Services description language... ... read more.
In the past couple of months two people have asked me about testing Web Services-based applications. Both times I was stumped. Certainly it's easy enough to see how Web Services developers might test ... read more.
Greg Goth of IEEE DSOnline recently interviewed abunchofWSpeople (including yours truly) on the relationship between Web Services, SOA, and REST. The results of those interviews in an article called " ... read more.
In my previous posting, I strayed into the subject of the kinds of addressing model that WS-Addressing should support, and was a little surprised to find myself quite opinionated on a subject I tho ... read more.
Steve Vinoski has been a strong proponent in the WS-Addressing WG of allowing EPRs to contain multiple addresses. Steve uses a cool business card analogy where when he presents a business card t ... read more.
Australian man's most solemn dilemma...Taken in Sydney Opera House a few weeks back - and how tragically true. ... read more.
Savas and I have been accepted to present a tutorial at WWW2005 in Chiba next year. We're going to be talking about message-orientation and the MEST architectural style. Our approach is going to be ve ... read more.
Wired News covers the Weed network. On the face of it, this seems like yet another attempt to separate listeners from their hard-earned - you get three listens of a track and then you have to decide t ... read more.
This is a fascinating piece from Greg on WS-RF. It's re-assuring that others also believe that Grid and Management are application domains and are not infrastructure, and that ironically using a pure ... read more.
Microsoft have just released a second version of its whitepaper entitled, "An Introduction to the Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications." Probably worth half an hour of your time as it's a ... read more.
I've just finished marking exams (yay!) for the master's course module in parallel computing that I teach. Something weird happend during the "Excel" phase of this work though. Before I entered the da ... read more.
Via Savas I notice that Mark (like Greg, a Java Transactions author) finally gets his backside in gear and starts a blog. Mark and I workedtogether for years, and argued constantly (but usually constr ... read more.
Greg Pavlik (a mate from the Bluestone Software days, and Java transactions author) speaks out at his new blog. Greg is a profoundly good software geek, expect good things to come. ... read more.
...but probably shouldn't be.Timdispairs of the future of Web Services. I share his concerns, but am somewhat more hopeful this week after talking with abunchofgoodpeople who seem to grok things my wa ... read more.
Savaslets the cat out of the bag. We're begining to see the architectural fruits of our labour now with the first writings on the MESsage Transfer or MEST (was ProcessMessage) architectural style. We' ... read more.
Living in Australia has been a wonderful experience so far, but I have to say it isn't all Bondi babes and barbies. In particular Australian news media is, alas, a pitiful mix of local sensationalism ... read more.
Two different unrelated people (thanks Iztok and Aruna!) in two consecutive days both recommended the Skype service to me. On the one hand Skype is just like MSN messenger and its moral equivalents, b ... read more.
Like Savas, I just started to get referrals from Mark Pott's new blog. Mark's got some very sensible ideas about the whole Web Services shebang, so don't be put off by his corporate affiliation :-) Gr ... read more.
The deadline for submission for the special edition on Web Services Architecture has been pushed back by a week. New deadline is the 8th November 2004.Clearly I am not evil enough. Must read more Catb ... read more.
Time's running out for submissions for the special edition of the International Journal of Web Services Research for which Savas and I are acting as editors. If you're planning to submit a paper on yo ... read more.
Based on some of the workSavas and I have been doing on Web Services architecture, I wrote a piece on how WSDL should be used for WebServices.org which was published last week while I was out of town ... read more.
It's been a while since I've blogged. The last few weeks have been mental with the day job and preparing for a bunch of talks I'm going to give over the coming weeks. These started off last Friday wit ... read more.
Via Lindsay, at last someone with a proper job blogs about it. Subscribed. ... read more.
Tim near enough gets it. What is SOA all about? Plain old message passing.However, what happens when we need to relate various message exchanges to constitute an application? Simple: we need context ( ... read more.
Phil Wainewright has a neat commentary on SOA vs Grid on his blog at LooselyCoupled. There's a wonderful soundbite:But to position grid as the ideal platform for SOA is asking too much of grid ... read more.
In an attempt to understand the position of the Web Services folks, Mark B. asks, "What's the simplest task that cannot be coordinated using a uniform interface?" I think this is a very profound quest ... read more.
Via Savas, this paper on Microsoft's take on a holistic view of the various Web Services specifications.I agree with most of this, especially that SOAP is the lowest point in the Web Services s ... read more.
Lately a few of my posts have gone a little bit squiffy when uploaded into the pBlog engine that underlies http://jim.webber.name. Something to do with the way the post engine deals with the HTML I se ... read more.
The Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services conference is taking place in Sydney's CBD on October 25/26th. This looks to be a good forum for architects and developers since it contains a good ... read more.
One thing I always find interesting when watching presentations is the few seconds before the presentation begins and you get a glimpse of the presenter's working environment, normally the "start" men ... read more.
Savas and I are acting as editors for a special edition of the International Journal of Web Services Research on Web Services architecture. The "official" CFP went out last week while I was away snowb ... read more.
"Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk who carried a gun and ran from the mob. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense. Why would a Wookiee, ... read more.
Via Jeff's blog, Microsoft appear to have become good Web Services citizens with this announcement that they are "committed to license its essential technology on royalty-free, and other reasonable an ... read more.
In a recent blog entry (which is an excellent post), Savas writes about the current problems going on in the WSDL WG. There is indeed a problem here since there are two factions within that group: one ... read more.
There's going to be a complete power-down in the server room where jim.webber.name is hosted over the weekend. Hopefully normal service will be resumed by Monday. ... read more.
The WS-Addressing specification has now been submitted to the W3C. I speculated earlier that such a move could be the start of a really promising piece of unification work with WS-MessageD ... read more.
A few months back I was contacted by WebServices.org to join their editorial team. Now the new site has gone live, the first essay in my column has appeared entitled, "Web Services: REST in Peace?" ... read more.
The weather conditions looked favourable so we headed out to Stanwell Park on Saturday to take the new NovaSyntax for a spin. Turns out that conditions were marginally soarable as ... read more.
This speech is probably slashdotted to death by now, but it's a great piece. The section entitled "The Final Frontier" really had me nodding, "...if you're a technology company, [your coder's] t ... read more.
There's a good article by Maarten Mullender on MSDN about dealing with data access and concurrency control within the implementation of a Web Service. I especially concur with the words on views and s ... read more.
Savas is over at CalTech at the moment, presenting some of the WS-GAF work at a workshop on Service Composition for the Virtual Observatory . While Savas was talking ... read more.
I saw this paper on Xen via Chris Ferris' blog. Aside from the syntax which I think is clunky (understandably so for a research prototype) I think this is an excellent development. In my day job it me ... read more.
For the first time in almost four years I'm going to be teaching part of a masters course in computing science. As of the beginning of the next semester only I'm going to be leading the Network-B ... read more.
I've just noticed that Mark, Greg, and Jon's new book "Java Transaction Processing : Design and Implementation" has been released. If you're working with the Java platform and hav ... read more.
Recently I've been observing a definite upswing the in the use of REST-friendly words in the Web Services community. REST has been mentioned without attracting a huge amount of criticism in the ... read more.
I'm going to be talking at the ACS Web Services SIG in Sydney CBD this Wednesday (7th July) on Web Services and WSE 2.0. The underlying theme of the talk is that messages are important (check out ... read more.
Daveconsiders compatibility and evolution which is worth a few minutes of your time reading. His summary almost completely resonated with me: Compatibility for asynchronous and synchrono ... read more.
This is a call to arms against soap:action. Normatively described as, "[serving] a similar purpose as the SOAPAction HTTP header field did in SOAP 1.1. Namely, its value identifies the intent of the m ... read more.
For me at least the GGF 11 conference is over and I'm now back in Sydney. The conference actually finishes today local time, but due to a prior commitment compounded by losing a day crossing the i ... read more.
Folks that know me will attest that I'm definitely in the pro-Microsoft camp. In fact I can't remember ever having said anything awful about a Microsoft product in recent memory (i.e NT onwards).B ... read more.
This digital pen idea from Sony looks great. I hope future applied HCI research will produce more stuff like this since we've been stuck in the "un-collaborative interface" mode for a long time. ... read more.
GGF 11 starts in a couple of days time here in Waikiki, until then most folks are attending HPDC. Except it would seem for these three guys (Steve, Savas, and Malcolm) captured by a surreptitious inte ... read more.
It's time for GGF again, this time it's in Hawaii which will make a welcome break from the winter down here in Sydney (it's below 20 degrees now and I've grown soft since leaving the U ... read more.
Mark Baker has a recap of what he considers to be the high points of Web Services development over the last five years. One of them is on the "processThis" model that Savas and I advocate:Jim Webber a ... read more.
Over on the WS-CAF mailing list, Bryan Murray (an acquiantance from my HP days) indirectly raises an interesting point: when should we use SOAP faults and when should we use normal messages to convey ... read more.
Savas, Mark, and I wrote an article comparing WS-Context and WS-ResourceFramework for Web Services Journal which appears in this month's edition. While both WS-Context (which is part of the larger ... read more.
The Register is carrying an article on the new CODEC released by none other than the BBC. I wouldn't normally be excited by yet-another open source release but this having BBC backing is an int ... read more.
I'm going to be completely offline for the next five days as I'm off to Bright, Victoria for a final few days paragliding before the winter rolls in.I'm going to be absolutely without Internet access ... read more.
OK, so the title is a little facetious (back at ya Mark), but this post by Matt Garland sums up how Web Services should be. These are not baby steps, these are huge leaps and they aren't mired i ... read more.
I'm going to have to stop using fake equations as the titles to blog posts, people read too much into them. But in this case I think I have a point.Steve blogs:I take issue with the purists who say t ... read more.
The GGFGrid Transactions research group held its first conference call yesterday (well, very early in the morning today for me) and began the process of gathering use cases. At the moment the uses cas ... read more.
...it's two addressing specs. Some of my old pals at Arjuna have been busy lately with afew otherfolkspitchingintoo. They've just submitted the WS-MessageDelivery specification to th ... read more.
Some of this really resonated with me, some (like getting rid of objects and saying that distributed system design is easy) didn't. However there are some good points about distributed computing ... read more.
Over at his blog, Jacek says that: "Web Services are the communication infrastructure on which Distributed Objects systems can be built." I could not disagree more vehemently.Certainly s ... read more.
First the flagship OGSI project goes to OASIS to be ratified as a Web Services specification *cough* under the WS-RF brand. Now some of the technology providers who have Grid stories (I mean stories i ... read more.
Kostas pointed out to me that the feed links on my powered by pBlog post pointed to localhost rather than to the actual RSS and Atom feeds from jim.webber.name. This was because I uploaded the entry ... read more.
It seems that every time I try to describe some aspect of Web Services by contrasting it with vaguely similar concepts from distributed objects, someone always gets on their high-horse and jumps down ... read more.
If all goes well this should be the first physical blog entry in my pBlog-powered blog. Savas has been busy tweaking the PBlog configuration and a little of the codebase and I've been running it loca ... read more.
From xml.coverpages.org, this announcement that yet more strangeness is happening in the Grid (be afraid all you good Web Services people, these Grid guys are our (logical) neighbo ... read more.
Mark Little sent me this link to Bill de hÓra's blog (now subscribed). Seems the concepts Savas and I have been espousing might not be too mental after all, although I've never really tho ... read more.
Steve Loughranblogs on a Ted Newardpost. The post itself is very interesting, but the bit that really resonated with me was:"Clearly, Ted is lucky enough not to have read any of the WS-Resou ... read more.
There is an announcement circulating on the Web from the OASIS Electronic Business Service Oriented Architecture TC, which is linked from WebServices.org. I know that there are folks out there who rea ... read more.
Yesterday evening I attended an ACS Web Services SIG talk called "Implementing an Asynchronous Web Service." I thought a little light education wouldn't go amiss and the title seemed innocu ... read more.
A while ago Savas and I wrote an article on why WSDL isn't really like an IDL in the classical sense, which has just been published in this month's Web Services Journal. ... read more.
I've just read Mark's blog. He asks rhetorically, "Are Web services unknowingly using the uniform interface? Answer me this; is it the objective of the Web services architecture to permit ... read more.
I've spent today working on a paper on creating Service Oriented Architectures with Web Services technologies which I'm writing with Savas on the basis of discussions we had with Mark. We ... read more.
I just found out about a Web Services SIG in my adopted home town of Sydney. It's run by the ACS (like the BCS but upside down) and they run meetings with invited speakers as we ... read more.
As I mentioned previously, for my current work I've been able to switch from Java to the .Net framework and I'm pretty happy with the switch - with the advent of WSE, .Net is the platform fo ... read more.
I've been reading through some of the work on brokering from Indiana University. This is pretty interesting work, and similar in some respects to some work on enterprise service buses. M ... read more.
I met Pat a few years ago at TechEd (2001?), and liked him immediately. Although we disagreed about whether or not you could run (extended) transactions over Web Services (nah nah nah nah!) his ... read more.
A few weeks back I was interviewed by Joe McKendrick of McKendrick Research for a piece on Web Services/Grid convergence. The resulting article published on WebServices.org has sou ... read more.
Savas drew this diagram which I think is compelling (even though it is in his favourite girly colour scheme). It shows that managing virtualised resources across organisations isn't scalable ... read more.
I'm back in Sydney after a hectic time at GGF 10 in Berlin. Perhaps the only advantage of the fairly gruelling flight schedule I've had this week is that it's given me a chance to catc ... read more.
Over the last few days at GGF I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of folks involved with evolving Grid middleware standards, including the guys from Globus and IBM who proposed WS-R ... read more.
I'm at GGF 10 in Berlin, currently listening in to the data workshop while hacking some new code for the WS-GAF GRM document registry (I got bored with writing in J# and decided to ... read more.
The GGF web site is carrying a very sketchy PDF document saying that the GGF's OGSI revisions (aka WS-RF) will be tackled under an open review by both parties. Does this sound the death ... read more.
I just stumbled across this whitepaper by Felipe Cabrera, George Copeland, Jim Johnson and David Langworthy linked from Becky Dias' blog. It's an overview of WS-Coordination, and the two ... read more.
I'm a bit late in discussing this, but IEEE Distributed Systems Online are running an interview with Ian Foster on the recently announced WS-RF specifications. There are a couple o ... read more.
I'm coding again, which is a joy. Better still I am working on the .Net platform which I used to look at with envy while working in the piecemeal world of Java Web Services for the last few year ... read more.
I'm working on a paper with Savas, Paul and Thomas. A comment from one of our reviewers, Pete Lee, helped me to crystallise some of my thoughts on why an object isn't like a servi ... read more.
In my day job I often talk with other people in the HPC and distributed systems field. I am often dismayed to hear people's views on SOA and how it is "just like OO." One thing I notice keeps cr ... read more.
Anyone visiting http://jim.webber.name over the last few days will have seen my holding page. I wrote a book with Sandeep Chatterjee last year on Web Services. The book is called, "Developin ... read more.
OK, so this is a less than auspicious start to my blog, just catching up with a few posts that have sat in my outbox waiting for upload to my fab new pBlog instance. Unfortunately I haven't trie ... read more.