It’s hard to keep up with all the new scripting languages, so I haven’t. I mean I’ve had a quick look at Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, but nothing much more than that. I think it’s because there’s always a new one coming along and it’s hard to tell which will have actual longevity. Having recently seen that Groovy will be going into JavaSE in Mustang I thought I’d have a look (once it’s in SE it’ll take a lot to get it out). I have to say I’m impressed. It looks easy enough to reuse my Java API knowledge and has a pretty clean syntax. I really like the idea of writing an RPC server/IM bot in just 7 lines of code. The other thing I realy like is how easy it would be to combine standard Java and scripted Groovy. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll use it for but I’m going to try to… see if I can get into scripting languages through this pretty gentle learning curve.
Archive for December, 2005
Off to Edinburgh tomorrow for Hogmanay 
Going to stay with Vic… and have no solid plans yet… but that’s ok.. it’s Edinburgh there’ll be loads on!
How much personal information is easily googleable… and how many security questions could it answer about me?
…was when my Gran asked: Shouldn’t you be trying to find a girlfriend?
Higher points included opening presents, seeing my grans and aunt (and friend), lots of good food, and DrWho. I’ve never been a massive Dr Who fan. I enjoyed some of the recent episodes but really enjoyed the Christmas special. Bodes well for some watchable TV this spring (as opposed to endless ‘reality’ tv).
Last week when I sent out my Christmas cards I put them in the letter box, walked home, and found a remaining stamp. There really shouldn’t have been a remaining stamp. Sorry to whoever I managed to not send a card to (or worse if the post office made you pay over the odds to get it!).
Go on, interpret it. Dare you.
… and I’ve been back in Dundee for a few days.
I’ve done very, very little. It’s been great. I did catch up with Mountford last night, hearing about his last few years, and his plans for the next few. Travelling round the world for a few years sounds like it could be fun but it’s not something that I have any ambition to do. Seeing small bits in small holidays over the next lots of years is more up my street.
Where is the open standards based alternative to Windows Live and dotMac with lots of AJAX goodness?
I host illsley.org for a blog (wordpress), photos (gallery), jabber(don’t actually know), email, file storage.
dotMac and windows live will do bits of this, without the open standards. Live will do it with my domain, dotMac won’t.
I want a company to stand up with an open standards version of dotMac which supports domain hosting.
A bit of innovation on top by aggregating stuff which people define ‘public’ and there’s lots of potential…
Please?
P.S. The comments about windows live are possibly scurrilous rumour. I remember reading things to this effect but can’t find them right now.
[Update] The windows live service I was thinking about is http://domains.live.com/ It actually only does e-mail and IM…
Services Oriented Architecture is a topic that IBM has been pushing very hard for the last 4 months, with significant product development close to me in Hursley based on it.
I realised recently that this means that I should probably check that I understand what it is…. thankfully I do. More importantly, working in an area of Hursley which develops IBMs Enterprise Service Bus I thought I should try and work out what it is for.
So here goes. Services Oriented Architecture is a design pattern for distributed enterprise applications. It is based on XML document exchange using web services standards. An enterprise is broken into a set of services which are loosely coupled, with communications via XML document exchange, not focussing on RPC or object access. This makes it simpler to managed the loose coupling as the coordination is designed without specific method semantics in mind. This also simplifies message content transformation/routing/protocol transformation. This would appear to be the purpose of an Enterprise Service Bus. Because of the Document, Asynchronous nature of SOA an ESB provides SOA type interfaces and then passes/transforms the messages to the ‘back end’ and returns the results in the appropriate format. This is good for standard multiprotocol EAI tasks, Merger/Acquisition integration regardless of whether both companies use web services and for flexibility in implementation of a given service (can be swapped out e.g. for outsourcing, better implementation).
So, as IBM said for a while, an ESB can simply be a model to be implemented with other products, but I can see a benefit for building a specific ESB product: it’ll be designed to make it simpler to use.
That’s a brief summary of my understanding of what SOA and ESB mean. I’m sure it’s not complete or possibly even accurate… comments welcome.
IBM WSA interoperability public endpoint information.
Over the next month we’ll be exercising this and endpoints from other companies pretty extensively leading up the interop. event in Vancouver.
