Web Things, by Mark Baker

Via David Forslund, a pointer to a set of workflow patterns.

Good stuff. I’ve been contemplating updating my Hypermedia Workflow paper, and this would be a good base from which to restructure it.

I also just stumbled across a paper entitled “Workflow Description for Open Hypermedia Systems” which sounded intriguing, but was I ever disappointed to read it; it just talks about Web services and WSFL. It seems academia is making the same mistakes as industry. 8-(

On my O’Reilly weblog. If this doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

Norm lists the countries he’s visited.

I’ve wanted to put together a similar list of my own for a little while, since I stumbled upon a list (wow!) put together by Paul Cotton‘s daughter Cecilia earlier this year.

Here’s mine. That’s 22 I’ve slept in, and 26 I’ve been too. Not too bad. But I really need to spend more time outside of Europe and Scandanavia.

Tim relays some news from Jean Paoli, that in addition to releasing the schemas for the Office formats, documentation will be released too. He writes;

In general, I think that this kind of tech doc is an order of magnitude more important than schemas,[…]

Big +1

Until last week, the SOAP document/literal examples I’d seen differed from the rpc/encoded ones only by the encoding. Then I spotted this example (in section 5.1 – sorry, no URI) in the WSDL 2.0 Primer;

<?xml version='1.0' ?>
<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
 <env:Body>
	<customerName>Kevin Liu</customerName>
	<checkInDate>2002-09-01</checkInDate>
	<checkOutDate>2002-09-10</checkOutDate>
	<roomType>double</roomType>
	<comments>the customer will be arriving late in the evening</comments>
 </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

Ignoring the problem that there’s not a single child element of env:Body, this is, from a Web architecture POV, quite encouraging; we have a SOAP envelope encapsulating state. Very RESTful (at least the part of the architecture that is visible in that example).

But if you know where (how?) to look, the Web is nearby. The key is to realize, once you’re dealing in state, that the obvious next question is, “The state of what?”

Can this be it? I think I’ve just found the key to describing the relationship between the Web and document-style Web services. Cross your fingers. If all goes as planned, the next few weeks are going to be very exciting.

Scoble writes;

I’m watching 636 sites every day. Try to do THAT in your Web browser.

Which way would you prefer?

And not to mention that “not using the browser” is different than “not using the Web”. How did you get that RSS? Uh huh, I thought so. 8-)

As an interesting addendum to the Eolas debacle, did you realize that Mike Doyle from Eolas flaunted their acquisition of the UC patent on www-talk? ’nuff said.

“Tech Curmudgeon”, while probably still an accurate description of my attitude towards so much “new” technology, wasn’t really conveying, at a glance, what my weblog was (currently) about. So I’ve renamed it “Web Things”.

There’s a double-entendre there, but you probably have to be a Web-head to get it (or at least come down on the right side of the httpRange-14 8-).

Though he didn’t use the words “self-description”, a good article nonetheless.

FWIW though, I think XML only provides the syntax in which contextual information can be serialized. It’s a start, but we need more.