Coyote Gulch

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

2003 Denver Mayoral Transition
The transition is not over. There are still a few appointments to make. Here's a look at Mayor Hickenlooper's first 100 days in office, from the Rocky Mountain News [October 29, 2003, "Hickenlooper's first 100 days"].
12:49:36 PM

Denver Charter Changes for the November 2003 Ballot
Here's an article about Referred Question 1A, on next week's ballot, from the Rocky Mountain News [October 29, 2003, "Overhaul or overdone?"]. Mayor Hickenlooper and many of his appointees, along with a unanimous City Council, feel that the Charter needs to be changed to allow more flexibility in times of declining revenue. City workers and others point out that the Mayor and Council have managed to balance the budget during the worse crisis Denver has ever seen without changing the Charter. Coyote Gulch has predicted that the changes will pass by a wide margin.
8:19:28 AM

Denver November 2003 Election
Governor Owens and Attorney General Ken Salazar (who's daughter attends my alma mater, North High School) speak out on Referendum A in today's Denver Post [October 29, 2003, "A pro and con on Referendum A"].
Here's a story about a Pro-Referendum A ad running on the west slope, from the Rocky Mountain News [October 29, 2003, "West slope ad bucks going down drain"]. The Rocky [October 29, 2003, "Referendum A AdWatch"] has an analysis of a Pro-Referendum A ad.
Mark Paschall is still trying to get a critique of Amendment 32 posted on Jefferson County's website, according to the Denver Post [October 29, 2003, "Amend. 32 critique pushed"]. His original submission was rejected last week.
The Denver Post has all sorts of election information listed here.
8:03:06 AM

2004 Presidential Election
Howard Dean made a stop in Colorado yesterday, according to the Rocky Mountain News [October 29, 2003, "Dean rally fires up supporters"]. From the article, "In attendance were many of the city's Democratic leaders, including Mayor Will Toor and CU regent Cindy Carlisle. Dean spent the night at the home of Rollie Heath, the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and his wife, Josie Heath, a former Boulder County commissioner. A breakfast fund-raiser drew more than 300 people, participants said." Here's the coverage from the Denver Post [October 29, 2003, "Dean courts wide spectrum"].
John Kerry was also in Colorado yesterday, according to the Rocky Mountain News [October 29, 2003, "Hair cuts into Kerry's support"]. He didn't have the same type of turnout as Dean however. From the article, "A waffle breakfast for the Massachusetts senator and Democratic president hopeful drew only about 10 people at the University of Colorado on Tuesday, even as several thousand rallied for political rival Howard Dean outside. The waffles were symbolic of what Kerry's supporters say is Dean's waffling on issues"
7:49:04 AM

Colorado Software Summit 2003 - Day 2
Making Web Services Secure: An Introduction - Kelvin Lawrence, IBM
Kelvin is the Co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Security Committee. He started his presentation saying that the goal of the committee is to foster strong and reliable interoperability along with security. He dealt with security at the SOAP message level. The seven aspects of security are, Identification, athentication, authorization, integrity, confidentiality, auditing, and non-repudiation. Kelvin stated the shortfalls of browser-model security and why HTTPS isn't enough. The talk included a review of SOAP. The WS-Security model makes use of existing XML security standards like, PKI, W3C XML Signature, W3C XML Encryption, W3C XKMS (key management service), OASIS SAML (Secure Authorization Markup Language), and OASIS XACML (Access Control Markup Language). Basically WS-Security has added parts to the SOAP message.
Portlets (JSR-168) - Dave Landers, BEA Systems, Inc.
JSR-168, the Portlet specification, was finalized a few weeks ago. Dave explained what a portal is and how portlets relate. Portals aggregate content and portlets are that content or mini-applications. Dave explained that a portal application is part of a WebApp. Portlets cans use Servlets and JSPs to generate markup fragments and they have access to other Servlet container services, along with J2EE services if the WebApp is in a J2EE container. Portlets generate markup fragments, not web pages. Standard Portlets should be portable across Portal vendors. There is a related spec from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets that is not part of JSR-168.
Struts Controller in Action - Gary D. Ashley Jr., 3rd Millenium Visions, Inc.
Gary introduced the Struts framework from the Jakarta Project. He mentioned that version 1.1 includes support for modules and plugins and is now integrated with Tiles. JSTL and EL are also supported in the new version. There is a 1.2.x version in the wings also. Modules help you divide up your project. Plugins provide an extension point to add or enhance functionality. Tiles is a powerful templating engine that allows you to assemble presentation pages from components. Gary mentioned some of the main elements in configuring Struts, including, web.xml, struts-config.xml, tiles-config.xml, validation-config.xml, and messages-text.properties. He then went on to show how these files worked to enable the functionality of his sample application. He demonstrated Digester and Action Mapping.
Web Services and Mobile Devices - Peter Haggar, IBM
Peter is part of a research group inside IBM that has been building Web Services for mobile devices for a year or so. Their work is the foundation for the IBM Web Services Toolkit for Mobile Devices. He demonstrated web services running on Blackberry and Palm devices. He showed samples using Java and C. Mobile devices fall into three categories. WAN (Wide Area Network) with connections to cellular services, LAN (Local Area Network) utilizing 802.11x, and PAN (Personal Area Network) using Bluetooth. Right now no devices exist that can roam through all three. There exists a plethora of features and devices and that limits portability and drives application design. Firewall tunneling is a problem as is security and performance, and a limited range of UI components.
6:44:16 AM

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