March 2005

I guess I may have to take back my comment that comparing REST and SOAP is like comparing apple and oranges :-) (via Paul Thurrott) Read more [...]

May is fast approaching and Jim and I have been starting thinking about the details of our WWW2005 tutorial on architecting and developing message-oriented Web Services. In the original proposal we had suggested that we were going to use WSE 2.0 for the discussion but now that the Avalon/Indigo March …

I thought that some of the proposed directions were obvious but the delivery is great. (via Radovan)

/**/ The commentary from Tim Bray (“Stop WSDM”), Grek Pavlik (“WSDM Standardization: Just Say No (For Now)”), Mark Little (“Why WSDM isn’t ready for primetime (yet)”), me, and I guess others made Mark Potts reply (“Response to Stop WSDM”). First, my apologies to Mark for the lack of support for …

In a discussion over at Sam Ruby’s blog and on his “Distributed state machines” post, Robert Sayre made a random thought which I find intriguing. In a service-oriented world, like that promoted by MEST, where integration between services happens through metadata-sharing about the services’ messaging behaviours (described in languages like …

/**/ Just joking… I haven’t come up with yet another specification. While travelling to Seoul, however, I was thinking about the on going discussion on REST vs SOAP. This is my small contribution to this discussion: An implementation of the ‘Web’ using SOAP :-) Background reading Lately the REST and …

I’ve known about the MyLifeBits work for some time now. We have even had brainstorming sessions here in Newcastle on how we can relate future research work on large-scale distributed systems with the excellent work that Gordon Bell and his team are doing. The project is presented in this Channel …

/**/ I am off to Seoul, Korea tomorrow for GGF 13. I am not particularly thrilled about it since the meetings have become more and more boring due to the politics and the uninteresting technical work that is taking place there. The Grid application domain folks decided to build a …

The OASIS WSDM TC has decided to submit the WSDM specifications as an OASIS standard despite the negative vote. This is really bad for Web Services standards. Greg Pavlik blogged about what has been happening in the TC (post 1, post 2, post 3). I totally agree with Greg. How …

/**/ Yesterday I was chatting with my friend Marty about WS-Transfer and the fact that we weren’t aware of any implementations out there. So, I challenged myself to write one in 30 mins using WSE. Well… it didn’t take 30 mins but a couple of hours because of a stupid …

A discussion often taking place within the Grid community is the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) and the use of modified X.509 certificates for delegation scenarios (RFC 3820 – “Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Proxy Certificate Profile”). Not everyone agrees with the approach and, hence, the use of GSI sometimes …

/**/ That’d be cool. The article is questioning whether there would be value in upgrading to Longhorn if all of its pillars are available for Windows XP. I speculate that Microsoft will be first offering consumers an intensive to upgrade by offering a new user experience (Aero, new driver-support, multimedia …

/**/ In the past, I too have been responsible for fuelling OS and platform related arguments. However, for quite a few years now I realised that the choice of a tool is a personal matter. In the same way I don’t try to push to people my favourite programming language, …

/**/ This short article on “Architectural Styles for Web Services” mentions SSDL and MEST. Jim Alateras demonstrates how a simple Web Service could be described using WSDL, implemented using HTTP, and described using SSDL.The problem at hand makes SSDL look remarkably similar to WSDL. Indeed, the equivalent SSDL would be …

Pat Helland is moving to Amazon. Pat is one of those people that I would really like to work with. I think that the team being created in Amazon to do service-oriented, global-scale computing sounds really exciting. I guess Pat will closely work with that team. Very interesting! ;-) Read …

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