Friday  2002-11-01   Development

Mixing Design by Contract and Java

Interested in Design by Contract and Java? Read "Evaluation of Assertion Support for the Java Programming Language" by Reinhold Plösch.

Tuesday  2002-10-29   Software

Agents everywhere

Well, not quite. Despite years of research by both academia and commercial interests, agents are still rare creatures. But there are more and more would-be agent-runners and they may like to read "Key Issues in Agent Technology" by James Odell and compare it with a more general overview of AI, "Architectures for intelligent systems" by John Sowa.

For a contemporary example of agent technology, see ABLE or Agent Building and Learning Environment (described in this paper).

Addenda: see also Odell's columns at Journal of Object Technology:

• "Objects and Agents Compared"
• "Agents and Complex Systems"
• "Agent-Based Manufacturing: A Case Study"

Tuesday  2002-10-29   Development

Standard SQL

Whatever merits SQL may have, portability is not one of them.

Tuesday  2002-09-24   Web of Services

Sunset for web services

A telling paragraph from an old article on connecting Microsoft Office applications with web services reveals why Sun has already lost web services battle.

Making implementation of Web services easy for VBA, Visual Basic 6.0, and Visual Studio .NET developers is Microsoft's key tactic to maintain its front-of-the pack status among today's Web service Gang of 2.5. When Sun delivers on its Sun ONE promises and Oracle releases its SOAP-enabled 9i Application Server sometime in 2002, there'll be fierce competition for developer attention between the expanded Gang of Four. I'm betting that new SOAP-based developer toolkits, such as that for Office XP, and on-time release of Visual Studio .NET will make Windows the primary platform for hosting and consuming commercial XML Web services.

Wednesday  2002-09-18   Policy, Process, Mechanism

Why startups are interesting

That was the team: the group of five. In time it expanded, but to start with, these five alone made up the famous cadre, and to have been one of them, said [one of the five] afterwards, was "like holding a Communist Party card with a single-figure membership number."

from "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John Le Carre.

All five are members of fictional British Intelligence during Cold War trying to rebuild the service betrayed by a traitor a la Kim Philby.

Wednesday  2002-09-18   Software

More on cross platform WYSIWYG HTML|XML editors

See a follow up note of the original note.

Saturday  2002-09-07   Web of Services

Business process management overview - part 1

Past few months saw an increased interest in business process management (BPM), first from the release of BPML by BPMI.org and then from BPEL4WS, WS-Tx and WS-Coordination by IBM and Microsoft. Before getting overwhelmed by waves of acronyms and their revisions, innoculate yourself with a review paper "Business Process Coordination: State of the Art, Trends, and Open Issues" by Umeshwar Dayal, Meichun Hsu, Rivka Ladin from VLDB 2001. The authors were given "Ten Years Award" for their VLDB 1991 paper judged to be the most influencial paper over the decade since original publication: "A Transactional Model for Long-Running Activities".

Modelling business processes as long transactions and workflows is one valid and useful approach. As pointed out in Contours however, it is not the only one. Other orthogonal approaches may include semantic web and agents (whose pedigree and history are another long transaction of computer science research and industry). More notes on these are forthcoming.