Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Websphere 5.0 announced: Web Services, a clever mix of open source and proprietary features IBM pushes Web services, e-business in WebSphere upgrade. Version 5.0 to ship Tuesday [InfoWorld: Web Services] Web services features include the Axis 3.0 open-source SOAP parser for improving Web services requests by a factor of four to five, and support of Web Services Invocation Framework, an IBM technology that enables Web services to be deployed over networking protocols such as CORBA IIOP, MQSeries, and JMS. Web services over AOL Instant Messaging also is supported. ... In addition, using Parallel Sysplex technology, multiple mainframes can be linked together as one system. Mainframes also offer a workload management mechanism for managing service-level agreements. IBM is really good at leveraging the Open Source: they involve some of their top engineers, like Sam Ruby in the Apache community, then they really leverage that by integrating the latest and greatest of the Open Source, like Axis; then they add some value added proprietary software that  is necessary to industrial strength sites, like WSIF. And some proprietary soft that runs only on their proprietary hardware, so that if you really want some advanced features you have to buy their hardware. Clever. The good scalable WS stack will be useful for the Grid computing area: Websphere will be their vehicle of choice to implement the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)   Other functions of WebSphere 5.0 include HTTP clustering for sharing workloads between multiple application servers, and servlet-level clustering for managing the link between the Web and application servers. I need to look at what their docs to see what this means exactly. I thought they already had that in Websphere 4.01. BEA had these features since Weblogic 6.1 ! 6:42:08 PM    comment []

Thursday, October 31, 2002

IBM talks up "computing on demand". CEO Sam Palmisano outlines the company's vision of businesses buying computing power the way they buy electricity today. Big Blue is staking $10 billion on that vision coming to pass. [CNET News.com] 12:58:22 AM    comment []

Monday, October 28, 2002

Sun CTO posits new computing era. Papadopoulos outlines "network scaled computer" era [InfoWorld: Top News] Viewing the increasingly complex, networked computing environment from an IT manager's perspective, Papadopoulos acknowledged the high cost of ownership confronting user companies and proposed that Sun will solve the problem with technology, not people. With as much as 80 percent of a typical IT budget spent on people operating a company's IT infrastructure, vendors are faced with a choice of solutions to offer users, he said. "You can go after this by going after services," Papadapoulos said, referring to IBM's recent decision to acquire services provider PwC Consulting. Or, a company can decide "I'm going to engineer that out," he said. Sun's focus will be on the latter, and on technologies that forward data center automation, according to Papadopoulos. Let's engineer the admin chores out of the our IT infrastruture so that we can concentrate on what's interesting: building interesting apps ! 10:05:46 AM    comment []

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

SETI@Home Faces Funding Problems [Slashdot] I don't care too much, since I'm not a believer in extraterrestrial intelligence, but what is interesting in the /. thread is the list of other projects that I find more "useful": fold proteins, cure cancer... SETI@Home was interesting in its computing model.   9:50:10 AM    comment []

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Grid computing meets Web Services Grid Computing: Electrifying Web Services, from Web Services Journal is a good article about the new Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), where the grid uses web services. The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) combines technologies to unlock and exploit grid-attached resources. OGSA defines mechanisms to create, manage, and exchange information between Grid Services, a special type of Web service. The architecture uses WSDL extensively to describe the structure and behavior of a service. Service descriptions are located and discovered using Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL). By combining elements from grid computing and Web services technologies, OGSA establishes an extensible and interoperable design and development framework for Grid Services that includes details for service definition, discovery, and life-cycle management. 7:36:12 PM    comment []