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.

 
permalink   
 

Saturday  2002-09-07   Web of Services

Business process management overview - part 2

Another good paper on this topic is "Web services and business process management" by Frank Leymann, Dirk Roller and Marc-Thomas Schmidt, all well known experts of workflow. First two authors are co-authors of BPEL4WS spec as well.

 
permalink   
 

Wednesday  2002-07-31   Web of Services

"f r e e" or "f e e"? - value of letter R

Aptly named blog "The End of Free: for-fee online business models, subscriptions, web applications, content sites" is so far thankfully free.

 
permalink   
 

Tuesday  2002-07-23   Web of Services

Jini presentations

Presentations from Sixth Jini Community Meeting [Boston] held on June 17-20, 2002 are available.

 
permalink   
 

Friday  2002-07-19   Web of Services

Digital ID week: XNS, Liberty and spam

This week saw two important milestones for digital identity.

First XNS. Two years after initial announcement, OneName has finally released its initial specs of XNS or Extensible Name Service. As "Digital Identity" (a blog on the subject) point out, OneName has been trying to become ICANN of digital identity in vain. How much traction will XNS enjoy?

Second Liberty Alliance ("Say No to Microsoft Passport"). It also released its 1.0 specs. As can be expected the 1.0 specs are not without problems but they have supports from many technology companies and, more importantly, many of their large corporate users.

To be blunt about it, current drive for digital identity is led by corporations wishing to herd their customers by tagging them. However digital identity can be a force for the common good: John Patrick (a former IBM executive) envisions spam free world thanks to authentication provided by digital identity.

 
permalink   
 

Thursday  2002-07-18   Web of Services

Amazon's new services

The XML Cover Pages reports

Free Amazon.com Web Services Facility Supports XML/HTTP and SOAP. A new Amazon.com Web Services facility using XML/HTTP or SOAP allows developers to build applications and tools to incorporate information from Amazon.com into their web sites free of charge. The toolkit enables searching for Amazon.com products in a variety of ways (keyword, author, actor, director, ASIN, UPC, publisher, etc) and to get results in XML. One may pass the server an XSLT style sheet to get customized reports.

Jon Udell likes to see how REST and SOAP will compare. There is already Amazon Light, a Google like GUI for Amazon using the new services. [from Mike Cannon-Brookes' interesting blog rebelutionary]

 
permalink   
 

Wednesday  2002-07-17   Web of Services

Rendezvous

Apple is shipping OS X 10.2 "Jaguar". Its most interesting new feature is definitely Rendezvous.

Rendezvous lets ordinary users create an instant network of computers and smart devices just by getting them connected to each other. The computers and devices take over from there, automatically broadcasting and discovering what services each is offering for the use of others. The network could be as simple as two AirPort-equipped PowerBook users sitting in a hotel meeting room miles from the nearest AirPort base station with some large files they need to share. Before Rendezvous, frustration. With Rendezvous, their computers would discover each other making the file sharing completely simple.

Also from an earlier Apple page:

Rendezvous makes the automatic discovery of available computer services possible on standard Internet Protocol networks. Based on ZeroConf and the IP standard DNS service, Rendezvous lets you connect to such networks without having to fiddle with settings. You can connect your computers and peripherals together however you like — wirelessly over AirPort and by physical connections such as FireWire or Ethernet. Additionally, Rendezvous provides a service-centric view of the network, so you can quickly tell what’s available.

We look forward to making rendezvous with Rendezvous.

Update on 2002-07-19: see also Jared White's "Rendezvous: It's Like a Backstage Pass to the Future" and his interview with Stuart Cheshire at Apple and chairman of IETF ZeroConf Working Group.
 
permalink