WS-* vs. REST: Jigsaw vs. Tangram puzzle

Harry Pierson quotes Nick Gall on the value of using a small set common modular operations (i.e. the REST / WS-Transfer approach):

Modularity can be open or closed. Closed modularity is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of individual pieces, but they can only be put together one way …

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Novell cans CEO, CFO

Novell today terminated CEO Jack Messman and CFO Joseph Tibbetts. Messman is replaced immediately by Ronald Hovsepian, Dana Russell is interim CFO.

Novell has long been the hardest-to-parse of the major OS vendors. To say they "owned" the network market in the early 90s is to understate things. Their fumbles …

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Solstice Dive: I Love Living in Hawai'i!

Yesterday, Tina and I went for a dive off Honokohau Harbor just north of Kailua Kona on the Big Island of Hawai'i, a 10-minute drive from our house. Tina and I mostly freedive; this was the first time we had tanks on our backs in five months. Two eagle rays …

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Column on SOAs and Windows Vista

My latest SD Times column is now available online.

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Rise & Fall of CORBA: Very Good Article

Michi Henning's article on the history of CORBA in the latest Queue is very good indeed. Henning has biases (he's got his own middleware solution) but the article never strays too far. It's opinionated, but accurate. Some of the timeline discussion is a little overblown but not too much (CORBA's …

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Jolt Award: Considering Dynamic Categorization via Tagging

The Jolt Awards are the major industry award for software development tools (compilers, libraries, etc.). One problem we face every year is proper classification of tools. Traditionally, we try to refine / fine tune the previous year's categories (Development Environments; Libraries, Frameworks, and Components; etc.). Problems arise frequently balancing the number …

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Vista Voice Recognition: Very Nice

Vista has built-in voice recognition capabilities. One of the things that really jumped out in the Tablet PC was that the correction interface makes all the difference when it comes to using alternative input techniques: a service pack released for the Tablet a year or so after the initial launch …

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Garden Point Ruby.NET: True Compiler Available for Download

"[Wayne Kelly is] pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler. The compiler can be used to statically compile a Ruby source file …

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Stock Spam: Sell Signal?

I take it as a given that every stock touted via spam is, in fact, the subject of some sort of pump-and-dump scheme. That is, someone currently owning significant amounts of the stock (or options) is praising it, with the intent of causing upward motion, at which time they will …

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Project Glidepath: A Software Factory in Action?

The blog is too cluttered with marketing-speak, but the accompanying 22-minute video is very good in conveying what "Project Glidepath" is about: guidance (including, but not just code templates) for "MicroISVs" (1-10 person SD teams), integrated into the IDE. Too much "software factory" talk has been very rarified; it's nice …

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