Dienstag, 12. Februar 2002

SOAP implementations Sam comments on my note about there being over 80 different SOAP implementations. Obviously there are far less that are actually being used. And Interop is a great thing and necessary to make sure the different implementations all work together. One of the most interesting things I did last year was write a Cocoon frontend for the Las Vegas interop example. Gave me a chance to hang out on the soapbuilders list on Yahoo - which provided great insight. The thing I fear as web services make it into corporate heads and networks is that it is still not clear enough what web services actually are and what it means to implement them. Decision makers are running around (slowly getting up to speed) and demanding web services. Not that they really understand much about Interop or anything else (after all why should they). On the other hand they are being led to believe that "there are no problems" (see my earlier posting today).

Cocoon makes the press Great  (even if I do say so myself :-)) Cocoon article in the new issue of the published version of the German magazine Javamagazin (7 pages!). And that is only part 1. That makes 2 Cocoon articles this week (and it's only Tuesday).

Way back when Frank points me to this. Ah I remember it well. Back in those days we used to get on a train and go to the nearest larger town just to buy one of these mags. Then we would spend forever typing the listings into our VIC 20, Sinclar.. Now those were the days. How come I find it funny that my son wants an XBox? How come he doesn't have to debug those endless lines of DATA?

Axis and Cocoon Sam finds a Cocoon based blog. Sam - how about kicking some *ss in the Cocoon list and hitting them on the head to get Axis integrated? Somehow I think I am alone thinking we should be using Axis to turn Cocoon pipelines (or collections of pipelines) into web services (complete with WSDL etc.) and using Axis to dispatch the calls into the relevant pipeline. But then again - perhaps I am wrong :-).

Although it may seem that I am being rather cynical on web services - that is really not the case. They will take over the world - well at least the technology will. Well actually it is already here - right? The problem is that most popular articles written on the subject (and hey - those are the ones read by people making at least some of the decisions) seem to suggest that WS are something like the philosopher's stone (or sorcerer - depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on). As an example - check out this article. It is in German so I will just translate 3 extracts - and you'll get the idea: "Da alle Webservices, die auf diesen Plattformen entwickelt werden per se interoperabel sind, ist die Plattform-Entscheidung nicht mehr erfolgskritisch." Because all web services that are developed on these platforms [meaning Microsoft .Net, Sun One, IBM Webservices, Oracle 9i, HP] can interoperate with each other, the decision for a particular platform is no longer relevant to success. " Zu den zwei wichtigsten Anwendungsgebieten zählen auf der einen Seite Mitarbeiter-Portale " One of the two most important application areas [for web services] is that of employee portals... "In einem Projekt lassen sich also problemlos Lösungen miteinander integrieren, die auf ganz unterschiedlichen Plattformen aufsetzen" Project solutions developed [as web services] on different platforms can be integrated together without any problems. Hmm......so now you know :-).

I have created a new category for the Cocoon book. Check out the link on the left to go there directly. I will be posting book stuff there.

Test for new category

Now just over a week into using Radio to do my weblogging (and just over a week of weblogging for that matter) - time for a short status report. Well the radio program is really neat and offers lots of potential. On the one side a clean easy to use interface for simple "blogging" and on the other side the ability to do lots more - like access web services via macros. And you can probably do a whole lots more.....sometime maybe I will find out. On the downside I was not able to get it to run properly on an iBook that is not always connected to the net. It seems as though that is what you really need (a permanent connection that is). Licencing is also slightly negative - because I want to maintain the same "cloud" from home and from work - I would need 2 licences. Or use the mail to log capability which I have not tried yet. All in all I am just starting to get my head around this new area and really think there is great potential for using web logs etc. in more collaborative scenarios (i.e. inside a company as a "thought-board"). Hey I like that term - has it been used?

If SOAP is a standard - then why do we need this? At last count there are over 80 different SOAP implementations (probably not all being maintained). Why?

Ok, time for some updates on the book. Well first of all it is about Cocoon 2.0 and not the previous version. In total it has 17 chapters (or elements as our publisher likes to say) and all together we will land with around 500 pages. About 100 pages of that are reference material. What I thought I would do is write about each chapter day by day to give you some idea of what the book will look like. I will start that tomorrow (hopefully). For now it is worth pointing out that the book is aimed at a wide audience, so it is not a "developers handbook"  nor is it a "how do I explain XML to my boss" type of book. We like to think that it offers something for everyone whether you are starting out with XML applications, interested in getting up and running with Cocoon or even somewhat of a Cocoon guru.