Nick Gall's Weblog

Thursday, July 03, 2003

New SOAP Reinvents Distributed Computing via Aspect-Oriented Messaging. Recently, the W3C ratified SOAP v1.2 as a Recommendation, which gives SOAP the status of an official Web standard for the first time. SOAP has come a long way since late 1999, when META predicted its ubiquity and recommended it as a "quick and dirty" approach to low-end B2B integration. SOAP v1.2 makes abundantly clear that SOAP is intended to be far more than a primitive XML-RPC mechanism. SOAP provides the foundation for a completely new style of distributed computing based on a lightweight, extensible, distributed protocol for exchanging and processing structured information via user-extensible message exchange patterns (MEPs), user-extensible message (header) processing models, and user-extensible bindings to exchange (e.g., HTTP, SMTP) and execution (e.g., J2EE, .Net) technologies.  SOAP v1.2 makes two fundamental revisions to SOAP v1.1 to make it even quicker, but also a lot cleaner and more broadly applicable. First, v1.2 is based on the W3C XML Infoset standard, which effectively supercedes XML 1.0 as the language for defining XML-based standards. Because SOAP is defined in terms of the Infoset's abstract data set, it is free to use diverse serializations besides the verbose XML 1.0 angle-bracket (</XML>) representation, including compact binary representations. This change effectively eliminates any limitations on the use of SOAP due to bandwidth concerns. Second, v1.2 provides a much simpler and more powerful aspect-oriented mechanism for extending the SOAP processing model. New aspect-oriented features can be added to SOAP by defining additional SOAP headers and how to process them. Such features can range from transport-level features such as security and reliable messaging to business-level features such as spending-policy enforcement to personalization and differentiated service. Bottom Line: Users who consider SOAP to be just a low-level RPC mechanism should review SOAP v1.2 to understand its potentially profound architectural implications for distributed computing. 5:54:18 AM

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

(Historical) Analysis-Driven Innovation. An interesting question is the degree to which sustaining and disruptive innovation are based on or driven by analysis of data regarding the system to be improved. Certainly, one must have some idea of the limitations of the current system in order to improve it, thus data collection and analysis seem central to at least sustaining innovation. This is an interesting interpretation of George Santayana's famous dictum: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Put another way: "Those who do not collect and analyze information about the past behavior of a system cannot improve it." But this begs the question of how evolution improves a system apparently without such analysis. Certainly, random mutation, which entails no analysis, can "improve" one member of a species. But is the diffusion of such an improvement dependent on some process akin to historical analysis. Something to ponder. 5:07:13 PM

Monday, June 30, 2003

The Emerging Network Era. No question about it. The Network Era is emerging. I call it the xWeb Era but its the same thing. And blogging is an amazing example of it. For example, I go to Jon Udel's blog for some reason I forget now, and run across the whole RSS vs. Echo debate. So I then go to John's RSS section and run across a reference to Ray Ozzie's piece on Tyranny, Terror, and Technology. Lo and behold, who does Ray refer to on my favorite subject-modularity? My favoerite economist Richard Langlois and his piece on Modularity in Technology and Organizations! Blogging and Google both manifest this stream of consciousness style connectedness among concepts. This is truly the utility of the emerging Semantic Web. But how do you demonstrate such an hard to describe concept? 9:59:06 AM

Brett Simmons at inessential.com observes that weblogs are ten years old. Two commentators point out even older examples, including the first web site: info.cern.ch. This led me to the follow observations. Blogs are just a continuation of an Online/Internet tradition that can be traced back to bulletin board systems (BBSs) and newsgroups.   If one wishes to draw distinctions, I would distinguish the beginning of blogging with the first "popular" blog-specific software tool. Any claims as to which tool that is?   IMO the essence of blogging is in one's approach to creating blog content, not whether the content is chronologically ordered. Otherwise, any website with a list of chronological events qualifies as a blog.   What distinguishes blogging from web site development generally is its emphasis on generating periodic (daily) observational/commentary content with minimial technical knowledge required. Thus, the mere fact that someone posted her observations to her web site on a daily basis, still wouldn't fit the paradigm of blogging, if she used general purpose web site development tools to do so.   What has made blogging the mass market phenonomenon that it is, is the non-technical ease of use of its tools. 7:11:19 AM

It seems Radio has a bug/feature regarding updates to the Weblog Title/Description. The Stories Page and the individual stories pages do not update to the new title/desc, unless they are edited after the change. Minor annoyance, since I don't plan to change them often. 6:37:21 AM

The rise of the Internet and the Web, the dot-com bubble burst, and the subsequent IT recession have all contributed to a fundamental shift in the economics of the IT industry. For example, the dramatic increase in emphasis in outsourcing—from software development to data center operations—is a reflection of this economic change. I see this fundamental economic shift manifested in four dimensions: ·        Commoditization o       Standardization o       Specialization ·        Virtualization o       Minimization/Miniaturization o       Massification ·        Interoperation/Integration o       Extension o       Federation ·        Innovation o       Sustaining o       Disruptive 6:29:28 AM

Let me explain my weblog's description: "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." It's from the title of a book by a philosopher named Richard Rorty. I think of Rorty as a post-modern pragmatist--a disciple of Dewey and Pierce, but very much a reinventor of their concepts. I consider myself an ironist as Rorty defines the term. Hence the description of the weblog. 5:57:50 AM

Strange. I tried to rename my Weblog from "Nick Gall's Radio Weblog" to "Nick Gall's Weblog," and it took on my desktop but not in the cloud. Even stranger is the fact that my Weblog description "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" in the cloud is out of sync as well. It shows my very first description, which was a disclaimer. Perhaps posting this entry will help sync things up. 5:45:38 AM

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Finally, I've begun my first weblog. I'm going to try to post to it every day. We'll see how it goes. I chose Radio Userland for a variety of reasons. I knew of Dave Winer from his work on XML-RPC. Many of the bloggers whose technical acumen I respect use Radio. And finally, it seems to be fairly highly regarded in the few weblogging evaluations I could find, e.g., http://www.urldir.com/bt/. Currently, I am thinking about Web services and SOA. I'm trying to make up my own definition of SOA to add to the hundred's of others that are already out there. For my definition, I'm trying to generalize from the key concepts I see in the design of the Web services stack being promoted by IBM and Microsoft. I'll post more on this later. For now, let's get this first entry posted. 6:14:26 AM