Monday, October 14, 2002

Clemens Vasters is probably the most influential and one of the smartest folks I interacted with at the DevCon. He blew my mind a couple of times but one of the biggest revelations he gave me was convincing me of the importance and use of EnterpriseServices in .NET. Now, I knew they were there and I knew it wasn't like COM: dead but still COM+ is so 3 years ago you know? It was Clemens who convinced me that not only is a lot of that stuff useful but some of it is actually extremely vital and important. So thats where I'm going in my research.  The other thing is that Clemens is not even remotely (pun intended) worried about speaking his mind and is extremely smart. So I read with interest today as he skewers Roger Sessions (quite overdue): "Roger Sessions writes about WS-Transactions in his ObjectWatch news letter and the article shows that he shouldn't. First, his "Shootout at the Transaction Corral" has the most confusing lead-in story that I've ever seen for a story about transactions. It starts with how to get breakfast from two places at the same time and how that is a real life coordinated transaction -- it may be so, but why make a "real life analogy" if that by itself is so far fatched that it's losing the whole point." and  "That's a pretty short-sighted statement, because that says that a fortress (I personally prefer the cuter term "fiefdom" coined by the guy who actually came up with this model: Pat Helland) is always implemented as a homogeneous system. Not so: A "fortress" is a system which can very well be implemented as a heterogenous assembly of services implemented on different machines, different OSses and different platforms. If that's so, you will need AT to coordinate local, distributed transactions across, for instance, J2EE and .NET. Web Services are about interop, not the internet!" and: I can tell you what SHOULD happen. IBM, Microsoft, and BEA SHOULD redo their model and make three changes: eliminate the WS-C specification, remove the WS-T dependency on WS-C, and put atomic web service transactions (ATs) where they belong, in the trash. " Well, I think that Roger Session SHOULD try to understand web services, transactions and real world system complexity. Even inside the "fortress", interop counts. 4:56:22 PM

Andres Aguiar's Weblog: "When we looked at the application, we were surprised. The database design was really bad. There were tables with no primary key, referential integrity constraint missing, etc. So, we wrote the article focusing in the database design. You can find it in PDF here (304Kb)"   4:49:04 PM

Fawcette has an article on Dig Into WS-Security with the WSDK, immeditely relevant after Keith Balinger's talk.They also have an article on Use X.509 Certificates with the WSDK. Again, great timing-) 10:28:38 AM

Sam Ruby: "The Mindreef duo shared a wealth of immediately practical advice. If you ever consider deploying a web service based solution with components from more than one vendor, these are the guys to talk to." The single best thing for me, though, was that there was clearly a very strong shared point of view among most of the speakers as to the primacy of data. If it wasn't for the data, why would we bother writing code? [Dave Seidel :: Wavicle] I agree wuth Dave on the shared view on the primacy of data. Its wonderful to go a geeky development confrence with a lot of different people from different campis if you will and having them all get down to the same something. BTW, I have been holding off on posting anything about MindReef's tool and I didn't give much beta testign time to Beta 1, but after seeing Dave's demo at the conference, I just must get Beta 2 and get going. This tool is fantastic. The WSDL "View" is fantastic taking that jumbled mess and showing me an "object view" among many other features. I was also impressed by Dave's talk and demo. Rairly have I seen such a balanced and fair talk, as they gave equal mention of many other tools. A job well done Dave. 9:24:43 AM