Monday, May 13, 2002

The intelliware.ca weblog has moved!  We've migrated the weblog postings to our home website intelliware.ca. We'll continue to post there.  Hope you like the posts and the new format! 11:16:14 AM

	Tuesday, April 23, 2002

Uh-oh, even Gates is saying PC "ecosystem" under oath.  Better find a new metaphor. :-}[gtb] 3:40:00 PM

More often than not, you run across articles that just make you scratch your head and say, "huh?"  Here's one.   What does Enron _really_ have to do with Deloitte striking up a relationship with Frictionless software? They say to aim at "vertical industry".  I guess "horizontal industry" is all booked up.[gtb] 3:38:02 PM

Douglas Busch, CIO of Intel Corp: "Every company has a diagram of the universe in which they're the center. That's never true. We're all a node in a mesh."   So true -- a wise observation in an otherwise tame article.  It is good to see that folks are starting to latch onto more emergent metaphors for software and systems.  "Eco-system" is a good start. [gtb] 3:22:11 PM

	Monday, April 22, 2002

I'll be darned, we had an earthquake on Saturday morning.  A taste of California in Ontario.  I'm glad we live on relatively solid ground. :-} [gtb] 3:07:00 PM

Some more blue-chip traction for Linux.  We've found it to be an excellent choice as a server environment. The price is right, it runs on anything, it's easy to lock down, and simple to configure. [gtb] 2:58:35 PM

Wi-Fi nodes in Toronto courtesy freenetworks.org  Hmmm, we're going to have to check these out.  It astounds me how much information there is out there...[gtb] 2:46:54 PM

Wi-Fi acceptance accelerates.  [gtb] 2:44:30 PM

	Friday, April 19, 2002

Sun has posted all of the 2002 JavaOne session documents in pdf format here.  You need to be a registered "Java Developer Connection" user to access them (which is free), but the postings cover a rich variety of topics useful to a range of people -- so it's probably worth your while to sign up. [gtb] 2:54:16 PM

Ed Carroll on ACM.org: "Comparatively, software development requirements of gathering, analysis, design and coding are all discovery-based exercises that lack absolute physical laws of nature to impose constraints, boundaries or guidelines. They are uniquely human, ephemeral activities that are unpredictable, immeasurable, ill defined and non-repeatable. There are rules of thumb, best practices and experience to guide the undertaking but nothing can be "proven" until the software runs. "  He concisely deflates the ill-fitting construction project metaphor that plagues software project management thinking.[gtb] 2:20:53 PM

An article that lets a little air out of the web services balloon.  It also serves as an excellent novice introduction to the concepts.[gtb] 11:35:00 AM

	Thursday, April 18, 2002

Here's another article regarding SOAP performance that articulates the long version of my previous post. [gtb] 3:09:52 PM

While it may be true that the SOAP protocol is "fat" and wasteful of bandwidth, that is probably not the key problem application developers will encounter with respect to performance.  Network latency, tunneling through firewalls, moving from the public Internet through application servers and hosts via a SOAP messaging layer will all take time.  If you expect an application to make too many of these calls too often, your application will be slow.  If the granularity of these SOAP calls is at the accessor method level, your application will be too slow.  If it is executed once an hour to synchnronize a batch of information that is worth the overhead of a call, your SOAP application performance will be just fine, thank you very much. [gtb] 3:08:58 PM

I was asked about my thoughts on the performance of SOAP-based applications.  My immediate reaction was "they'll be pigs".  After thinking about it a bit longer, I realized that the correct answer is probably, "depends how you use it".  In looking for real world evidence to support either view, I came across this article from this past winter: "You see, there's an evil little secret about Web services that most vendors don't talk about. Web services' protocols are very fat, and that means that Web services interactions over the network will be slow and eat up a large chunk of bandwidth." [gtb] 3:04:38 PM

An excellent technical brief on SOAP by Clay Shirky.  These O'Reilly briefs are outstanding.  They really get the root of the key practical technical issues.  Just like their books.[gtb] 2:37:56 PM

Bell Mobility is hosting a Wireless Internet conference here in Toronto next week.  A one day affair, the agenda looks pretty solid. [gtb] 2:12:33 PM

Yaaay open source: "Apache 2.0 Holds Its Own in Performance Tests", without any of these pesky security problems.[bs] 1:54:42 PM

	Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Probably the most promising aspect of the Sun-led alternative to Passport, the Liberty Alliance, is that it is based on a federation of trust, rather than one central repository.  Distributed, rather than hierarchical.  [gtb] 12:12:25 PM

Some interesting sidenotes to the cancellation of Hailstorm discussed yesterday.  The number of users subscribed to Passport, Microsoft's single-signon solution at the core of .NET doubled from 7M to 14M between August of last year and February of this year.  However, according this article, that number can be entirely attributed to consumers that are forced to use the service because of their need for other applications such as Hotmail and the Microsoft Developer Network.  Reinforcing the Hailstorm issues, people do not want a central service, and only use it if they must. [gtb] 11:46:49 AM

	Tuesday, April 16, 2002

Here's a companion piece to the Bill Joy observations about Microsoft's problematic security "architecture" I posted yesterday.  In this article, Scott Rosenburg points out; "The company boasts that it's making Herculean security efforts -- but throwing more people at software problems rarely solves them." [gtb] 10:49:43 AM

Here's an article detailing the problems with Hailstorm from a year ago. "If you dig through the mountains of buzzwords in Microsoft's HailStorm "white paper," you eventually discover that HailStorm is Microsoft's effort to make computing more convenient by allowing you to A) collect all your personal information in one format intelligible across many platforms and devices, and B) store all that information with -- who else? -- Microsoft. For a fee, of course. "  Looks like people understood that this was not a good thing. [gtb] 10:42:57 AM

Microsoft cancels Hailstorm. This is a very significant event.  Even Microsoft gets tripped up when they try to work against industry structure, instead of with it. [gtb] 10:36:34 AM

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