Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily relfect those of my employer
Saturday, October 12, 2002
I'm taking a deep dive into System.Xml.Serialization today. Meanwhile, it was very cool to meet some folks at the Web Services Dev Con. I did pay special attention to this man'stalk. I was there for about two hours and met manny-a-blogger. I especially enjoyed having lunch with Sam, Ingo, Brian, Alexis, and my compatriots Weidong and Adrian. I was there all of about 3 hours, then I had to rush back up to Beverly to continue coding.
Since I returned from vacation I have been on a journey... to finish a project. Matt, when did we start working together on this whole thing? It all started out when we were trying to answer the question: "How can we get Groove running on a handheld device?".
The current SOAP project was conceived around April 2001 and now I can finally see the path clearly from today until our first real ship date. These last few months at Groove have been incredible. Momentum is clearly building around Groove now. We knew it could take a while to catch on, but we also knew that when it did it would have huge potential. Matt, Ray and I believe that Groove Web Services will launch us into a whole new area of integration and hybrid web applications, with Groove itself playing a part of a much bigger picture!
Groove represents a unique and valuable paradigm for sharing computing and information with other people. The Groove Enterprise Integration Server allows agents or Bots to join a Groove shared space. Bots are peers who are always around and can execute code. And soon Groove Web Services will allow access to Groove shared spaces from any device capable of sending and receiving SOAP over http. The use case for most Web Services is completely inverted. Everyone is trying to build huge server farms to allow a web service to handle connection to millions of clients. Groove Web Services is more like your virtual private server that allows you (or your applications) to participate in your Groove shared spaces. It extends your Groove spaces to other computing environments or applications for you. Of course, there is no reason that the "you" couldn't me an agent as well..
Flow. I have my laptop with me now 24/7. Groove is always on. I'm debugging SOAP::Lite calling GWAPS (Groove Web Services Access Point Server - [working title] ) calling Weidong's Groove from my house, invited to chat, reading meeting minutes, synching up all my files from the dining room PC, running tcpTrace and watching it from VNC via VPN. And most of these bits are floating around the air in my house. Must... keep.... coding........
