Sunday  2004-01-18   Web of Services

Undemanded computing

Lately all the big firms of computer industry have taken up "on demand, seamless, ubiquitous, autonomous, utility, organic, real-time" computing made up with web services and grids computing. Problem is that none of it is true today and tomorrow and next year. Indeed, "it is tempting to conclude that the current marketing hype of the big computer firms is meant mostly to obscure the humdrum reality that overall tech spending will not regain the fizz of the bubble era any time soon."

Sunday  2004-01-04   Development

Programmers' deadly sins

A few of the deadly sins:

• The first deadly sin is to code before you think.
• The third deadly sin is not to write proper documentation.
• The ninth deadly sin is to pretend you are catering for everyone at the same time.

What is the zeroth deadly sin?
 
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Friday  2003-11-28   

Losing the Internet

The Internet is in danger.

• Apparently you can take over the Internet in your spare time
• and viruses and worms are getting nastier
• thanks in no small part to skewed economics and crooked business practices as well as shameful technological regressions.
• And eventually the Internet will have nothing to do with what its name stands for.

Monday  2003-11-03   Policy, Process, Mechanism

CIO under siege

CIO's prestige has been falling fast lately. The position of CIO has been a rather curious job. Unlike other CXOs -- CEO, CTO, CFO, COO -- a CIO usually has little or no mandate for future direction of a company. Neither board of directors nor shareholders are interested in what CIOs have to say. Not only that the other CXOs can divide up CIO's portfolio: CTO can deal with technology planning, COO day to day operations, and CFO financial reporting. It is hard not to caricaturize CIOs as glorified IT department manager with no role in leadership of at CXO level, whose business unit is that of support (mediocre and costly one at that). After ERP, Y2K and e-commerce extravaganza CIOs are nowadays fallguys.

However an observant CIO should spot a chance for redemption as corporations are changing to be more open and transparent. This is a chance to show how technology can drive corporations towards better corporate governance, corporate citizenship and public relations. Astute CEOs will support smart CIOs to achieve these goals (after making sure the board of directors would not take on their new protege!) making other CXOs jealous. [The last link is from the former CIO of state of Utah Phillip Windley's blog]

Sunday  2003-11-02   Web of Services

Data follows jobs

While David Lazarus' recent columns about outsourcing and privacy in San Francisco Chronicle below are not directly related to technology of web of services, they nevertheless illustrate privacy, consumer safety, intellectual property and trade relations problems that web of services faces as it becomes more tangled and widespread by technology.

• "A tough lesson on medical privacy - Pakistani transcriber threatens UCSF over back pay"
• "Privacy takes a backseat"
• "A politician who reads the papers"
• "BofA to send tech work, data to India"
• "SBC quietly spins off jobs to India"

Thursday  2003-10-02   Web of Services

More than enough? More to come?

OASIS lists following specifications and standards activities related to coordination of messages/transactions, especially in the Web Services arena:

• Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS)
• Business Transaction Protocol (BTP)
• OASIS Asynchronous Service Access Protocol TC
• OASIS Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF) Technical Committee
• W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group
• Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI)
• Web Service Composite Applications Framework (WS-CAF)
  • Web Service Context (WS-CTX)
  • Web Service Coordination Framework (WS-CF)
  • Web Services Transaction Management (WS-TXM)
• Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL)
• Web Services Conversation Language (WSCL)
• Web Services Transaction Framework
  • Web Services Atomic Transaction (WS-AtomicTransaction) [replaces WS-Transaction-V1, Part I]
  • Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) [Version 2]
  • Web Services Business Activity (WS-BusinessActivity) [to replace WS-Transaction-V1, Part II]
  • Web Services Transaction (WS-Transaction) [Version 1]
  • Web Services Coordination (WS-Coordination) [Version 1]
• WS Choreography
• Related Work (not further abstracted or referenced):
  • Business Process Management Initiative Specifications (BPML, BPMN, BPQL)
  • Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), including:
    • ebXML.org [ebBPSS] and Business Process Specification Schema v1.01
    • UN/CEFACT Business Process Specification Schema Project and UN/CEFACT's ebXML BPSS V1.09 Review Draft
  • OMG Business Process Definition
  • Workflow Standard XML Process Definition Language (XPDL)
  • Web Services Flow Language (WSFL)
  • XLANG

Update: A summary of current state of various standards from W3 mailing list. [via Web Services Strategies]

Saturday  2003-09-27   Software

Twenty missing years of GNU

Slashdot reminds us that Richard Stallman announced his intention to write GNU operating system 20 years ago today. GNU was to be an alternative to proprietry Unix system that could be shared freely among its users. Over the last twenty years,

• Unix vendors rose then fell (from early 1980s to mid 1990s),
• but free Unix like Linux and BSD picked up where vendors left (mid 1990s to date).
• The World Wide Web took off and the Internet expanded (early 1990s to date).
• And more and more users write their emails in Outlook Express or on Hotmail, read MSN with Internet Explorer and play games on PCs or XBox -- none of which existed in 1983 and all owned by Microsoft.