Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Xopus The Xopus in-browser XML editor. Regarding my article this week in InfoWorld, which says: ... [Jon's Radio] 7:33:17 PM Google It!      comment []

You Win Some.... Carlos has an interesting post about my rantings, telling me I'm completely wrong about my assumptions of M$ Tech: -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:32:18 PM      comment []

Real reveals code in single Helix move. RealNetworks releases the source code to its streaming media technology in a bid to set a single standard for media players--and to take on Microsoft. [CNET News.com] 7:30:22 PM      comment []

Interesting weblogs according to Peter Drayton Weblog Revue. Here are a bunch of interesting weblogs, covering a variety of topics: douglasp (Doug Purdy). Recently outed by Dare as a Microsoft blogger, Doug is a Java & CLR geek who is deeply involved with both current and future .NET Remoting - a topic near & dear to my heart! Somwhat surprisingly, Doug's blog has very few .NET-specific references - instead it touches more on philosophy, Doug's reading list & marathon running, Mozilla, Mac OS X/TiBook fiddling and a number of other non-technical topics. Overall, eclectic and personal. Green Hat Journal (Pinku Surana). Pinku's a DevelopMentor instructor and also one of the authors of the Hotdog Scheme compiler for .NET. Topic-wise, his blog runs the gamut: observations on implementing closures in .NET interspersed with references to Justice Scalia's interpretations, thoughts on animal rights & privacy issues, and biotech. Tecno-Geek Weblog (Brian Maso). Brian's another DM instructur who recently started blogging about Java and Web Services. His first contribution to the discussion is a counterpoint to Steve Loughran's excellent The Wondrous Curse of Interoperability, wherein Brian asserts that Web Service interop is overrated. This is obviously a controversial stance... Thinking About Software (Alexis Smirnov). I met Alexis in person for the first time last week at the web Services DevCon, where he'd driven down from Montreal for the conference! Although I had read his blog previously and had seen his posts in Sam & Greg's Groove Experiments project, it is always good to put a face to a URL. Alex's blog tends to focus on .NET & Groove, with a good ratio of linkblogging to commentary. All Things Distributed (Werner Vogels). I met Werner at the last Rotor conference - he's a researcher at Cornell, focused on high-end distributed systems, clusters & cluster management, and scalability/robustness analysis. The scale & scope of the problems that Werner is working on was truly eye-opening - the weblog updates intermittently, but it's a good subscription. Fast Takes (John McDowall). John was CTO for 2Bridge, then mySimon, and is now now the VP Engineering at Grand Central. I met John ~4 years ago when I was interviewing for a spot at 2Bridge Software. John impressed me, coming across as a smart, level-headed manager & technologist. His weblog has a similarly thoughtful tone. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I link it here for further reference when i have time to go read this stuff. 3:48:56 PM Google It!      comment []

Alan Cooper Interview: software Alan Cooper Interview. Visual Studio Magazine has an interview with Alan Cooper. An excellent read, Alan talks about the differences between engineers vs. craftsmen, the role of software architects, XP vs. RUP, and his opinions of the .NET platform. Highly quotable: The role of architects: "Architects synthesize people, purpose, and technology. If you just take people and technology, you have art—entertainment. If you just take technology and purpose, it's engineering. And people and purpose without technology is psychology." On complexity & components: "Software construction has often resembled digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon. You can make the walls of the canal perfectly straight, but it takes forever." How .NET provides portability: "... by providing cleavage planes. It's like cutting a diamond. You can't just cut one; you search for the natural cleavage planes in the diamond's crystalline structure. Likewise, you have to find the cleavage planes in the software and break it in two. Those cleavage planes, of course, are APIs and the CLR." On competition: "A Microsoft API such as the CLR allows an opening for other language vendors, as does offering Web services through XML. It means the days of getting all your services from one vendor—or even a single app—are numbered." [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I especially liked the whole talk about the current crisis in the software world: software constructors (he doesn't like the word developer :-) are not managed the differenciation he makes between engineers and craftsmen and the methodologies theses 2 arts generated: RUP and XP It's really a good read. 3:47:59 PM Google It!      comment []

Peter Drayton goes to work for Microsoft Cogratulations Peter!. How amusing is this... Right when I decide to start a full frontal assualt on Microsoft and .Net on this blog is JUST when my old boss and blog-buddy Peter Drayton announces his big news: During the past couple of weeks I've made references to impending personal changes. The time has come to share some very exciting news (for me at least!) with the ~2 people who read this weblog on a regular basis :-). Starting November 4, I'm going to be joining Microsoft as a Program Manager in the CLR team, doing my bit to "ensure that the CLR remains the most innovative multi-language runtime in the industry". ... It's sort of cool that I know Peter. It's easy to imagine a faceless, nameless borg called Microsoft, but when you actually have been in contact with someone who's going to be actively developing the technology you've been ranting about, you get a little perspective. I'm still 100% pro Java and anti-Microsoft, but now I know they're not all devil spawn up in Redmond. ;-) And well, for future reference, everyone should my late night rantings on this blog with a grain of salt. Maybe a tablespoon... ;-) -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] A tablespoon it will be :-) This time coincidence between Russ' anti .NET rants and his pal going to work at Microsoft is fun to watch: weblogs are full of surprises :-) 3:41:39 PM Google It!      comment []

Tanga: XML without the angle braces NBML -> Tanga. NBML is alive and renamed. The current working title for the project is Tanga rather than the hard to remember... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.] From the sourceforge page: Tanga is an XML parser that allows XML to be inputted in a concise syntax designed to be easier on the eye. Tanga XML enforces good style and removes syntactical noise. See Tanga Wiki for details. Interesting, reminds me of the triplet notation that RDF people use in order to avoid using the XML notation. May be useful for quick coding.   2:10:54 PM Google It!      comment []

an good XML editor as an Eclipse plugin A buddy for a buddy. böttch has found a new XML editor that seems to fit his needs. Having resisted paying for the seemingly-bloated XMLSpy... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.] I don't use Eclipse, but if I install it someday, I'll give this a try. 2:04:56 PM Google It!      comment []

Good looking Swing apps Swing apps. I've been down on swing applications recently they always seem cluncky and ugly. Here's a couple I've seen recently that... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.] This reinforces Jon Udell's recent comments about the renewed potential of java on the client for GUI apps. 2:03:18 PM Google It!      comment []

Mozilla as a SOAP client Mozilla -> Axis -> EJB. I've just finish converting an application from Mozilla -> XML-RPC -> EJB to Mozilla -> Axis -> EJB and it's... [<big>kev's</big> catalogue of this and that.] I just discovered big Kev from Russel's Blog and I subscribed to his feed: lots of good stuff there. The flurry of projects on Mozdev was just the start. Now that Moz has SOAP libraries, we should see many interesting stuff coming out with Moz as a client or P2P platform. 1:53:52 PM Google It!      comment []

Tim O'Reilly about Free Software Businesses Successful Free Software Businesses. I reiterate my arguments on the free software business mailing list, about why free software businesses need to be less dogmatic about who's in and who's out, and instead learn lessons from all businesses using free software, especially those building internet based service businesses on top of them. The followup by Ian Lance Taylor is especially right on. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] An interesting read. This part made me think, and smile: Company leverages free software strategically because it benefits from commodity software, and proactively engages with the F/OSS community even though it gets most of its revenue from other sources. Examples: IBM, HP, (Apple), (Sun) Company leverages free software strategically, tries to learn lessons from the free/open source software model, but depends on proprietary software or other proprietary IP for the heart of its business model. Examples: Microsoft, (Sun) It's all Sun's tragedy that it belongs to these 2 categories, so that its software strategy and attitude towards free software was never very clear. We'll see what the new Sun ONE strategy leads to. 1:45:34 PM Google It!      comment []

Portrait of a Blogger: a fun read Portrait of a Blogger. As blogs (love them or hate them) continue to grow in numbers on the 'net, I thought it might be useful to have an easy guide to study the habits and mannerisms of the wide range of bloggers that exist in the blogosphere. So, without any further ado, I give you a quick guide to the types of bloggers one might encounter in the vast internet universe. [kuro5hin.org] A fun read :-) 1:38:10 PM Google It!      comment []

Russel touched a nerve with his .NOT rant DotNot Ranting Feedback and Backlash. Wow... there's too many comments out there on my pro Java/DotNot rantings. I just spent the last hour TRYING to paraphrase them into some sort of post, but I gave up. Here's a list of responses. (Russ suddenly sees the advantage of Trackback blogging...) ... -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] It seems like Russel touched a nerve with his .NOT rant :-) My favorite comments are: Dot Not and More Dot Not [Big Kev] Russel thinks sun should fight FUD with FUD. I disagree Sun don't need to get into a FUD war. It helps no one. All you get it both sides pointing to the FUD of the other side. Sun needs to We need Sun to be commited to building the java language through constant improvement and inovation (Sun needs to sell more boxes, that's what they do). The DotNet Rant [Niel Eyde] .Net rant rant [Cedric] Java vs .NET [Rafe Colburn]   1:33:52 PM Google It!      comment []

Blogging mailing lists: an idea about the implementation Blogging Mailing Lists. I wish there were better tools for blogging mailing lists, so that these two types of conversations could cross over more often. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] Excellent idea. I think userland has that feature, send a mail to your blog, but what would be truly valuable would be to link automatically to the archived web version of the mail, in its thread context. In order to do this we would need 2 things: a standard WSDL for web archive of mailing list searching, something like MailArchiveSearch.wsdl: It could allow different modes of searching: date + author, or full text it returns the url of the mail in the archive An index somewhere, that could be decentralized using RSS, that would include the following informations: mailing list name: the key for lookup mailing list archive web site url of the entry point for the service that implements MailArchiveSearch.wsdl for that site (it could be implemented at a remote site, for example one that would aggregate search for different archives. a Google front end could do most of the archives I guess) Then when you forward the mail you are interested in, with your comments, to your favorite blogging tool, it would: extract the mailing list name lookup the mailing list search service, using an RSS aggregator like Merkaat invoke the search service if something is found, add a permalink to your post, to the archived email else, if no search service is found or if the mail is not found, just add your blog entry as is I may have a stab at implementing this for Radio, with the jakarta mailing lists, and maybe Google API... if I can free up some time for a personal project :-) 1:17:02 PM Google It!      comment []

TCPA and Palladium technical analysis. This article tries to be an objective technical analysis on the TCPA hardware system and the Palladium operating system. It covers the most important technical details on TCPA and the (dis)information Microsoft has given about Palladium. The full text is reproduced in this article, though you can also view updated versions in english (TCPA and Palladium technical analysis) or spanish (Análisis técnico de TCPA y Palladium) [kuro5hin.org] 9:07:42 AM      comment []

Sun to give away server software. The company introduces revamped application server software and a plan to offer a free version for Solaris, Windows and other operating systems. [CNET News.com] Sun's giveaway is intended to increase its share of the application server market. BEA Systems is the leader in the $2 billion market for application server software. But BEA's dominance in the market has begun to waver with increased competition from IBM and Oracle, which rank second and third, respectively, in the market overall. Sun ranks fourth with 7.9 percent market share, according to market researcher IDC.   9:05:34 AM      comment []

XML for Web Developers in 500 words [Paul Presod's Site] 9:03:24 AM      comment []

Corechange: Portal + Web Services orchestration Corechange adds BPM fuel to corporate portal. Software add-on taps Web services to automate business processes [InfoWorld: Web Services] "One direction portals are moving is [toward] a business application platform that can be deployed by the business user rather than IT. One thing you need to be able to do then is wrap the business processes [portal users] need into an application to communicate with partners or customers," he said. Furthermore, as business processes connect into more tools and different data types, the portal can form a UI for process management, he said. "The portal is becoming a place for both content creation and application access, and you need to take that application access into more of a workflow. There isn't really a standard application that spans all these different tools, but the portal can become that," Perry said. Excellent focus: mixing web services orchestration wiht Portal, + a GUI tool, sounds like an excellent proposition today. I need to look at what they have. 9:01:53 AM Google It!      comment []

SI could lead the path to service oriented architecture SIs retool Web services. SIs retool Web services - Large SIs (systems integrators), including Accenture, IBM Consulting, EDS, and Dimension Data are forging industry-specific business processes and frameworks for Web services environments. Based on existing Web services toolkits and standards, the frameworks aim to solve specific vertical industry business problems and address BPM (business process management) concerns. Collaxa's Take:We met with an customer on Friday that made an interesting comment: "We believe in the theoretical value of web services but do not really know how and where to get started". It is not really easy to start adopting a new architectural style: organic growth and SI-driven templatized solutions might be the path to the "service-oriented architecture". [Collaxa's Take] 8:50:12 AM Google It!      comment []