2006/08/11
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My old client beefs up their compound-document-supporting user agent.
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Just in time for my trip to London on Saturday. Joy!
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2006/08/10
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“I spend most of my time trying to convince SOA architects that XML formats should be filled primarily with URIs!”
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Ban photoshop!
2006/08/09
Sam Ruby writes;
The very notion of a link has become practically inexpressible and virtually unthinkable in the vernacular of SOA.
That’s an awesome soundbite, but I don’t think that’s the (whole) problem because SOA/WS does have links, they’re called EPRs.
But what SOA doesn’t offer, is a uniform interface for the targets of those links, and a uniform interface is what gives the links most of their value as each one contains sufficient information to initiate a subsequent action (e.g. GET).
There’s a unique symbiotic relationship between links and the uniform interface that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts; individually they’re useful, but together they changed the world.
2006/08/03
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The Fields medal winner will be announced later this month. P.S. who knew J.C. Fields was a Canadian? Not I.
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“What bothers me about the Google project is that I’ve heard they are scanning two copies of the book. What I want to know is: what are they doing with the second copy?!” OMFG.
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“There’s some new metaphor we’re groping for. I’ll know it when I see it”
2006/08/02
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Good post about of some of the practical issues of using caching, conneg, etc..
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“the ‘To’ is sent as the HTTP Request-Uri” Yeah! “and the ‘Action’ is sent out as […] SOAP-Action” Boo! Action should be the HTTP Request-method (via Nick Gall)
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Voice recognition problems in a public demo from Microsoft. ROTFL!
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“I don’t understand why our expectations for music technology are so low that we accept MP3 as an audio equivalent for HTML”
2006/07/31
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“Globally distributed SOA seems to be looming out of the mist, and it is a different shape to what was envisioned a few years back.” Envisioned by some perhaps 8-)
2006/07/30
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“Me, I blame WSDL and XSD”. Amen. Both of those encourage practices which are actively harmful to integration; WSDL encourages services to have different interfaces, and XSD limits extensibility (unless you really know what you’re doing).
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“You can do a lot with collections + CRUD” 8-)
2006/07/27
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“The Evans Data survey found a 37% increase in respondents implementing or considering REST, with one out of four surveyed saying that they are considering REST-Based Web Services as a simpler alternative to SOAP-based services.”
2006/07/25
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SOAPHttpRequest?! *groan*
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… and shows a lack of understanding of REST and Web style services. Sounds like they could do with another co-CTO (Tim?) 8-)
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“I suggest they roll some heads and figure out a real product strategy” Heh. Who couldn’t see that one coming? If I were them, I’d be be giving AOL a call.
2006/07/19
An important, nay, foundational part of my mental model for how Internet scale systems work (and many other things, in fact), is that I view standards as axioms.
In linear algebra, there’s the concept of span, which is, effectively, a function that takes a set of vectors as input, and yields the vector space spanned by those vectors; the set of all reachable points. Also, for any given vector space you can find a set of axioms – a minimal set of vectors which are linearly independent of each other (orthogonal), but still span the space (note; I use “axioms” here to refer to a normalized set of basis vectors).
So given, say, HTTP and URIs as axioms (because they’re independent), I can picture the space reachable using those axioms, which is the set of all tasks that can be coordinated without any additional (beyond the axioms) a priori agreement; in this case, the ability to exchange data between untrusted parties over the Internet. I can also easily add other axioms to the fold and envision how the space expands, so I can understand what adding the new axiom buys me. For example, I can understand what adding RDF to the Web gives me.
More interestingly (though far more difficult – entropy sucks), I can work backwards by imagining how I want the space to look, then figure out what axiom – what new pervasively deployed standard – would give me the desired result.
As mentioned, I try to evaluate many things this way, and at least where I know enough to be able to (even roughly) identify the axioms. It’s why Web services first set off my bunk-o-meter, because treating HTTP as a transport protocol is akin to replacing my HTTP axiom with a TCP axiom, which severely shrinks the set of possible things that can be coordinated … to the empty set, in fact. Oops!
See also; mu, the Stack, Alexander, software architecture.