Sam Gentile: Sam::XML and Web Services

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 13:41:09 GMT

PocketSOAP 1.4.0 beta 2 available. includes support for HTTP compression and HTTP timeouts on PocketPC [PocketSOAP News]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 23:32:44 GMT

John Giudice has started a weblog. John is another Product Manager here at Groove. He is in charge of the Groove Developer Kit and its various tools and utilities. John says:

Over the coming days I will try and share ideas on what is involved with creating collaborative applications and making them succesful

[Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

Cool! I worked with John a lot on the Toolkit. One of the very cool things that I always loved about John is he is one of the very few Product Managers I have ever seen anywhere that gets as dirty in the code as he does. He codes at home too. Cool!

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 13:25:40 GMT

Btw, in case any of you have been wondering at all why I really haven't been discussing anything about SOAP, WSDL or other specific Web service technologies as of late, the reason is that I've recently begun to make a transition from focusing on the individual technologies to focusing on the types of things that can be done with the technologies. For example, this new series of articles on developerWorks. Also, this emerging family of technologies. And lots of other stuff. In other words, now that we've achieved a much greater level of interoperability, what can we do with it? Driving the car is a lot more fun than building it.

[snellspace]

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 20:45:10 GMT

I have just been given a go-ahead (Visual C++.NET only so I won't talk about the rest) since a lot of this has gone public already. The Everett Visual C++.NET features, I feel, are the biggest changes to VC++ since 5.0 and have made me extremely happy. The features break into 4 main areas:

ANSI/ISO Compliance
Forms Designer for Managed C++
Security Features
Optimizer Improvements particuarly in floating point

The ANSI/ISO compliance is particularly exciting as Visual C++ finally does Partial Template Specialization, Partial Ordering, Member Template Definitions, and pretty much everything in the standard. Public statements have said 98% compliant. I have not been able to throw any Standard C++ at it that it couldn't compile and handle correctly yet. Very heavy users of advanced Standard C++ features, particuarly templates like Loki, Boost and Blitz now compile 100%!

Also, in the unmanaged arena, there have been significant additions for security, paticuarly in the area of buffer overruns. The new /GS flag, when code is recompiled with 71, will catch many buffer overruns. There are also Safe Exceptions which I won't go into here. Also, in the unmanaged area, there have been some outstanding improvements made in the optimizer, particuarly for floating point. The /G7 flag builds code optimized for the P4 and there are major gains. Also the new /arch:[SSE:SSE2] flags let you generate code for the Streaming SIMD and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 instructions.

Last, but certainly not least, there is now a Form Designer for Managed C++! You will be able to do everything you do with the C# or VB designer. You can visually design forms and work with Managed C++. This obviously opens powerful opportunities to do certain things like Direct/X without Interop penalities and much more. Its very exciting!

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 19:50:26 GMT

DM'er Jason Whittington has written a hillarious song on the whole PetShop saga. It so rules-). I can just picture Band on the Runtime doing it now. Sing along....

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 08:03:16 GMT

I want to step away from coding, talking about .NET altogether, and talk about abstraction, domain engineering, generic programming, and design paradigms for a bit. In 1999, I read a book by Jim Coplien, “Multi-Paradigm Design for C++”, which forever changed the way I looked at design paradigms. Lately, while reading Andrei Alexandrescu’s “Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied”, combined with doing a lot of “Modern C++”, I had several awakenings those shook up things for me even more.

For years now, it seems to me, we have had many design “gurus” repeating a mantra “Object Oriented Design good, all other techniques bad”, to the extent that for many developers and designers, that is the only paradigm that they use and even know. Abstraction is one of the key tools for managing the ever-increasing complexity of modern software. As Coplien says, “The common answer to what is abstraction usually has something to do with objects, thereby reflecting the large body of literature and tools that have emerged over the past decade to support object-oriented techniques.” Even more so, frameworks, languages and abstractions like .NET’s BCL and most of Java is only OO based (yes, I had been thinking about this for 2 weeks now, before Microsoft’s vapor announcement of future generic programming features in .NET). Java is touted, rightly or wrongly, as completely OO such that everything must be in a class. NET’s BCL is mostly only OO. Both of these, for the most part, wrap your abstraction and your way of thinking in object-oriented ways. Yes, there are exceptions (no pun intended!), but for the most part, most of the world thinks in objects. Well, that’s goodness, right? After all, it models the real world and builds abstractions much better, right? Well, yes and no. There’s no denying the vast benefits of OO but the key message in these books, and particularly Coplien’s book, is that Object Oriented Design is just one subset of the solution domain and not always appropriate for the problem at hand. {READ MORE...}

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 00:38:12 GMT

From the Rotor List:

On behalf of the entire Rotor team, I am pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Rotor. This release is available at the usual place http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli.

The 1.0 release builds and runs on Windows XP, the FreeBSD operating system, and Mac OS X 10.2. In addition, the release contains many bug fixes, more documentation, new samples and additional test suites.

Please download it and let us know what you think.

Geoff Shilling

Rotor Project

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 20:33:20 GMT

Just entered chat below and right off start getting messages from all sorts of bloggers-) Ethan Brown, Greg, Matt Griffith, Ingo, Simon, Alexis, Jim

Don's talking about the overall architecture right now and putting in place all the pieces that other middleware stacks have had, and going for adoption...SOAP Preliminaries: SOAP message format described by envelope is pretty straightforward...In general, SOAP fairly silent about what goes on in body, some to say about header...exists so 3rd parties can augment. SOAP has always had this extensibility mechanism. AS SOAP has evolved more rigor has been applied to headers and thats what we rely heavily on in GXA specs... Two roles Ultimate Reciever and Next (predefined).

Drill into WS_ROUTING - gives transport independent way of sending SOAP. HTTP wonderful, until end of time but lot of people want to send over other transports. Tried to abstract away transport details.

Yikes! So many messages from bloggers, can't keep track of talk...WS_ROUTING - Action, Id, relatesTo, To, Source Routing in form of Foward and Reverse Paths...We need Intermediaries for things likes firewalls, proxies, may want to smear message over several locations. Another aspect is hard to build IP Router...Idea rebuilding IP Routing in User Mode...Application aware routing...All of specs are layered on SOAP 1.1 and 1.2 not replacement for. Though probably end of line for SOAP in 1.2, if we don't hold constant, pretty hard to get Interop.

Move on to WS-Coordination, Released as same time as WS-Tx, so didn't get a lot of attention - bizare to me. The real interesting innovation, unknown stuff in WS-Coordination. 3 people of 75 have read it. WS-c igives us lot of functionality that people expected when moved from classic RPC. Look at Corba, COM. Tended to want to build things that lasted more than one msg - COM+ - Contexts. Want to establish temporal, spatial relationship. Take bunch of messages and make sure the context has an id. Spec is org in most peculair way - two most interesting things in 2 appendicies. Context = collection of messages over time that share at least one property - identifier. May share others. When 2 or more WS are doing work together they may want to establish shared context. Basic Header Type - Context Header Block - Contains at least ID and maybe more info. Header blocks have distinct URIs. WS-C pre-defines a Cordination Context. 2nd thing in Appendix - PortRef - contains bare minimum of address.

<CoordinationContext>

    <Identifier>uri</Identifier>

     <CoordinationType>uri</CordinationType>

      <RegistrationService>

            <Address>http://foo.com/mycoordinator.jsp<;/Address>

<PortReference>

    <Address>http://www.microsoft.com/foo.asmx<;/Address>

</PortReference>

WS-Tx really two specs - Part 1 2 Phase Commit and ACID. Part 2 Business Activities. ACID Txs - no one who worked on spec expected it to be used across trust boundaries. Part 1 exists to allow existing Tx apps to be able to do 2PC in a web context. Never intended to go across web sites and firewalls - across org boundaries. Tried to make that clear in the spec. Don't read Part 1 unless building Tx plumbing - codification of work done last 10-20 years in Tx. Part 2 really long-running transactions. Not strong isolation...No expectation of isolation or stability...BA is much simpler to understand - combine with WS-C an app dev could grok...So don''t wory about ACID, BA more interesting...

Reliable Messaging in next couple of months...Lots of plans...

Wow, I have to clean this up and get it in a story tonight...

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 18:05:30 GMT

WS-Routing, WS-Coordination, and WS-Transaction

Just in case you weren't aware...Don Box is scheduled to give a webcast this afternoon, discussing the above web service protocols. Details and free registration are here.

[Greg Reinacker's Weblog]

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 16:31:32 GMT

Here we go... As we near the initial release of Groove Web Services, we've started speaking more openly [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

Obviously, this has a big bearing on our Groove Experiments stuff.

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 16:30:35 GMT

Steve Gillmor's column also references Groove Web Services heavily. He mentions the contribution Peter Drayton made to the design of the API. No doubt, the value of enlisting Peter's help has been immeasurable. Thank you Peter! [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

The single best recomendation I have ever made...

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:14:48 GMT

Ticket to ride. 9:30pm Sunday @ Gate 89, Terminal 3, San Francisco International. I'm sitting here with a one-way ticket to Seattle. One-way. Wow. Seems slightly unreal... [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

He's off. I got an email last night too. Good luck Peter. I'm sure you will have a lot of fun as well as making a big impact.

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:27:24 GMT

Handy reference page for those looking for all of the Web services specifications IBM supports. [snellspace]

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 17:41:47 GMT

I would like to urge everyone working on web-services related activities, from REST to GRID, from security to choreography, to consider writing up your experiences and/or views and submit those to the WebServices track of WWW2003. This track will have a combination of peer-reviewed papers and invited talks, and I am sure real-experinces papers will be an important part of this. The deadline for paper submission is November 15, so you have two weeks to write down you thoughts. The track is chaired by Steve Vinoski (Iona) and Paco Curbera (IBM Watson). I am on this program committee and on the pc for the performance and reliability track.

I will propably do a paper exploring whether ws-coordination is indeed a good basis for constructing complex distributed interactions. Details once it is finished.[All Things Distributed]

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 13:13:36 GMT

RSS/2.0 Spoken Here. The grand RDF love affair fades... [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 13:32:03 GMT

O'Reilly has announced OnDotNet. At first glance it apeared to be a renaming of the .NET Dev Center until I found Shawn's editorial: "The goal of ONDotnet.com is to create a destination for the .NET community by ensuring content that is immediately applicable to working and weekend-warrior developers, while not ignoring the future of .NET and all of its related technologies (e.g. Web Services, GXA, XQuery, etc.)." Having Shawn as the editor is fantastic. Shawn has been in the trenches for years and as the ADO Guy has been dispensing valuable knowledge for years. Congrats!

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 13:51:25 GMT

Wow! Peter has joined the CLR team at Microsoft. I knew there were some big changes coming in this life but not this. This is awesome. It combines his passions in research with his in the CLR.

Starting November 4, I'm going to be joining Microsoft as a Program Manager in the CLR team, doing my bit to "ensure that the CLR remains the most innovative multi-language runtime in the industry". Specifically, I'll be working with both the internal compiler teams and the external academic research community to help identify, evaluate, prototype & productize future enhancements to the CLR. Formerly described by me as my Dream Job, it is a perfect fit for my interests: it involves a high-ish % of externally-facing work interacting with the research community and speaking/writing about the CLR & Rotor, lets me spend time working at the systems level with the CLR & Rotor, and requires me to stretch my commercial software development muscles again after almost 2 years of shipping mostly prose and slides. Most importantly, the job gives me an opportunity to actually *impact* the platform I've spent the last couple years of my life working on.

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:40:57 GMT

Pet Shop 2.0: Java vs. .NET. "My reading of this report is that .NET kicked Java's hinder in every single measure, from through-put and responsiveness to lines of code and lines of configuration required to build and run the app." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

That seems to be most other .NET bloggers reading of it (as well as others), so you have to start to wonder why some companies and IT shops continue to choose badly in the face of a lot of overwhelming and accumulating evidence. Not only do you get constrained to one language (well C with JNI for legacy) but you get to write more of it, have less features, less flexibility, and oh yah, by the way, its going to run a whole lot slower. It starts to become "Doctor, why does it hurt so much when I bang my head aggainst the wall" and "Well, stop doing that."

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:28:03 GMT

WIN-DEV - Part 2. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric] with pictures

Sun, 27 Oct 2002 16:39:32 GMT

Tim Ewald makes the case against SOAP Section 5 Encoding which the WSI-I was very smart to exclude and prohibit from their basic profile

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 21:33:00 GMT

Web services goals years away or unattainable, report says. Software as services called difficult to achieve [InfoWorld: Top News]

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 12:24:09 GMT

Peter has posted the slides for his excellent RESTful Soap talk at the recent WS DevCon. This talk was one of my favorites at the conference. I really felt that I didn't understand REST at all before. Now, I feel that I at least understand the major points. After seeing all of the "controversy" on the blogs and elsewhere, I really felt that Peter did a fine job of presenting both sides of the argument fairly. Peter's assertion that the intersection of the two circles between REST and SOAP is one that I believe now: there are valuable things to be gained from it.

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 04:00:25 GMT

BEEP and web services. I do like BEEP and I don't think I'm powerful enough! [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 00:03:25 GMT

The end of the conference season. Thoughts on the last two weeks at the Web Services DevCon and WinDev [Pushing the Envelope] "His observation that C++, Java and C# arguably move us away from where we want to be, at least in terms of flexibly manipulating data resonated in a very deep way, because it feeds directly into my own interest in exploring the direct use of XML in distributed systems. "

Wed, 23 Oct 2002 18:34:09 GMT

HOW TO: Use the ASP.NET Utility to Encrypt Credentials and Session State Connection Strings

This step-by-step article describes how to use the Aspnet_setreg.exe utility to encrypt credentials and session state connection strings.[Adrian Bateman (VisionTech)]

Wed, 23 Oct 2002 18:33:23 GMT

Here are the slides for the presentation Mark Ericson and Dave Seidel from Mindreef gave at the recent Web Services DevCon. We will revise this entry shortly to add links to the tools mentioned in the presentation. [Mindreef.blog]

Wed, 23 Oct 2002 18:32:43 GMT

PocketSOAP 1.4 beta 1. Now available, get it whilst its hot. [Simon Fell]

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 21:28:28 GMT

Fun time at Win-Dev. [IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development] John tells the story about our late night session, the "coming out" party for CLAW and makes all his slides available. A big thanks to John for the opportunity, the fun, and an intense AOP learning experience.

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 18:49:58 GMT

The .NET COM Interop presentation that I did for the .NET User Group of Greater Boston is now available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample source code. Warning! The source code is rough, simple and unpolished sample code to illustrate Interop concepts and is not complete nor intended for production use. Update: The presentation that I did for the New Hampshire .NET Users Group is also available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample code.

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 19:26:28 GMT

Type Safety in a Loosely Coupled World. In which I'm inspired by Tim Ewald and come to realize that runtime type checking is a very good thing. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Sam amplifies on this showing differences between languages and pointing to his excellent essay Dealing with Diversity. "Until recently, most programming activities were mono-cultures focused around a language centric base. A much more successful model is emerging. One in which the service provider has an opportunity to suggest what data types it would prefer. This gives the intended consumer an opportunity to adapt if it so chooses. Ultimately the service provider will decide whether or not it can process the request as sent."

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 16:30:34 GMT

Scott Seely, who gave an interesting talk, which may be the first time a Microsoft employee showed Apache Axis alongside .NET, has written a new MSDN article on a timely subject Understanding WS-Security. Of course, the hardest working man in the business has written on this as well as supplyinmg a toolkit.

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 21:27:11 GMT

Mugshots. Nice to see some faces behind the names i've been meeting online these last 10 days in the Groove Experiments space. Kinda reminded me of the Mugshot discussion on the Grooveforums some time ago. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

This is the group of people I spent most of the two days with. It seemed like we had known each other forever. We also went out to dinner on the last night along with Steve Loughran who is one funny Brit-). His talk was even better than last years (and funnier) and it would do developers good to remember we have to deploy these bloody things.

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 21:12:00 GMT

Too Many Web Services. Here's the "Top 10 Reasons You Know Youve Been Hacking Too Many Web Services..." that Tim and I presented at the Web Services DevCon (which was very fun, btw). [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Ah, Geek humor-)

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 21:56:22 GMT

Clemens Vasters is probably the most influential and one of the smartest folks I interacted with at the DevCon. He blew my mind a couple of times but one of the biggest revelations he gave me was convincing me of the importance and use of EnterpriseServices in .NET. Now, I knew they were there and I knew it wasn't like COM: dead but still COM+ is so 3 years ago you know? It was Clemens who convinced me that not only is a lot of that stuff useful but some of it is actually extremely vital and important. So thats where I'm going in my research. The other thing is that Clemens is not even remotely (pun intended) worried about speaking his mind and is extremely smart. So I read with interest today as he skewers Roger Sessions (quite overdue):

"Roger Sessions writes about WS-Transactions in his ObjectWatch news letter and the article shows that he shouldn't. First, his "Shootout at the Transaction Corral" has the most confusing lead-in story that I've ever seen for a story about transactions. It starts with how to get breakfast from two places at the same time and how that is a real life coordinated transaction -- it may be so, but why make a "real life analogy" if that by itself is so far fatched that it's losing the whole point."

and

"That's a pretty short-sighted statement, because that says that a fortress (I personally prefer the cuter term "fiefdom" coined by the guy who actually came up with this model: Pat Helland) is always implemented as a homogeneous system. Not so: A "fortress" is a system which can very well be implemented as a heterogenous assembly of services implemented on different machines, different OSses and different platforms. If that's so, you will need AT to coordinate local, distributed transactions across, for instance, J2EE and .NET. Web Services are about interop, not the internet!"

and:

I can tell you what SHOULD happen. IBM, Microsoft, and BEA SHOULD redo their model and make three changes: eliminate the WS-C specification, remove the WS-T dependency on WS-C, and put atomic web service transactions (ATs) where they belong, in the trash. "

Well, I think that Roger Session SHOULD try to understand web services, transactions and real world system complexity. Even inside the "fortress", interop counts.

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 21:49:04 GMT

Andres Aguiar's Weblog: "When we looked at the application, we were surprised. The database design was really bad. There were tables with no primary key, referential integrity constraint missing, etc. So, we wrote the article focusing in the database design. You can find it in PDF here (304Kb)"

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:28:38 GMT

Fawcette has an article on Dig Into WS-Security with the WSDK, immeditely relevant after Keith Balinger's talk.They also have an article on Use X.509 Certificates with the WSDK. Again, great timing-)

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 14:24:43 GMT

Sam Ruby: "The Mindreef duo shared a wealth of immediately practical advice. If you ever consider deploying a web service based solution with components from more than one vendor, these are the guys to talk to."

The single best thing for me, though, was that there was clearly a very strong shared point of view among most of the speakers as to the primacy of data. If it wasn't for the data, why would we bother writing code?

[Dave Seidel :: Wavicle]

I agree wuth Dave on the shared view on the primacy of data. Its wonderful to go a geeky development confrence with a lot of different people from different campis if you will and having them all get down to the same something. BTW, I have been holding off on posting anything about MindReef's tool and I didn't give much beta testign time to Beta 1, but after seeing Dave's demo at the conference, I just must get Beta 2 and get going. This tool is fantastic. The WSDL "View" is fantastic taking that jumbled mess and showing me an "object view" among many other features. I was also impressed by Dave's talk and demo. Rairly have I seen such a balanced and fair talk, as they gave equal mention of many other tools. A job well done Dave.

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 05:32:03 GMT

My presentation at the DevCon. After the presentation, I had an interesting conversation with Sam Gentile about VSIP and related stuff. [Andres Aguiar's Weblog]

Yes, we had a great conversation! This product not only totally rocks but its use of VSIP is beyond what I've seen anywhere else. I am really impressed. Rss-subscribed.

Sat, 12 Oct 2002 15:21:44 GMT

Hats off to one and only Mr. Sells and his great Technical chair, Mr. Ewald for an experience that just rocked on every level! It was technical to the point that my brain hurt but friendly and intimate at the same time. I dare say that it was even better than the last one. I have never seen a confernece where people just couldn't wait to talk to each other between sessions. People were all grouped, reaching out to share their experiences, making connections, excited by what they just heard. It was especially great to see the Axis community join in and having a wider audience this time. I have a lot more to write about this: the group of Groove Experiments guys I hung out, last nights dinner, the sessions but I want to mention two peak things with me: the ever gracious Mr. Box spending an hour with me yesterday drilling in on COM Interop questions and the amazing, cool, rocking demo that Clemens gave! His stuff just absolutely rocks! Go get it! Gotta go, Ingo just called and they are few miles away from the house, coffee brewing!

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 03:56:21 GMT

Sam has posted his keynote online.

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 03:50:15 GMT

The amazing thing is that the Web Services DevCon II is turing into BlogCon I. I have attached faces to so many faces of bloggers (over 15 so far). The really nice thing is that everone already feels close with one another, like we already know each other to some degree. Besides the usual culprits that I already knew well like Peter Drayton, Sam Ruby, Don Box, Tim Ewald, Ingo Rammer, John Burkhardt, Steve Loughran, and Jim Murphy, I have met Greg Reinacker, Brian Graf, Chris Kinsman, Clemens Vasters, Matt Croydon, Yassar Shohourd (whose book rocks and Congrats on Microsoft!), and of course Brian Jepson (its finally good to meet your editor!). It feels so much more intimate than last year and I think Blogs have a huge amount to do with that.

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:33:46 GMT

I'm falling a bit behind: it's awesome to learn that Sam, Greg and others are diving into some Groove experiments - particularly in the area of web services. Based upon what I've seen thus far, it's going to be really interesting to see what might be possible .. particularly in the area of aggregation and integration. Sam and Greg ... thanks! [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Thanks Ray! And a big welcome to Sam Ruby who has joined us!

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:24:27 GMT

I'm home from Day 1 of the Web Services DevCon II for the night and I see that Brian has already beat me to the wire with great coverage from day 1. A great read.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 18:04:53 GMT

Reminder: I will be speaking tonight at the .NET User Group of Greater Boston on COM Interop in .NET. I have a suprise "famous" guest who will be making his debut as a Powerpoint Slide Monkey-)). There will be other out of town guests as well. This is the third time I have done this subject in two months and I must say that the presentations have been totally different each time! The poor folks at the Tyngsboro Group had to hear me drone on for 3 hours and 10 minutes and 91 slides! The really good news is that I have totally redone my presentation and streamlined it into a much more powerful and cohesive story. Come on down and see if you agree. Would love to meet even more people.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:07:24 GMT

Can You Feel It In The Air?. That's DevCon fever... [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Yes, I can feel the power, brother!. Can I get an "Amen"? -)

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:06:11 GMT

Fun week in Boston for Web Services fans.

Had a great time at the soapbuilders interop meeting today. For once, the Axis team was actually ahead of the curve in terms of implementing the group H and group I endpoints!

One more day of interop, then the Web Services Devcon. Lucky thing all this stuff is close to home! Very much looking forward to seeing everyone there, and the great discussions which will ensue.

[Glen Daniels : it's just metadata...]

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 01:08:51 GMT

Movable Radio Template Missing Page Read Macro. I had 465 Referal hits yesterday. Today I have like 85, including one only on my home page. I know from other people that its been hit a whole lot more than this. The only thing that changed was the "Movable Radio" template. Is there some strange bug with that or is there some problem today with http://www.weblogs.com/rankingsByPageReads.html?

Solution from Roland Tanglao :

For whatever reason, the Userland web bug that tracks referrers is not in the templates. If you add it back, your referrer list will be updated.

http://radio.userland.com/trackingHitsAndReferers

Ok, I think its working now. Thanks Roland! Update: Now seems to work on all pages except my home page, ven though its in there in the template. This is so fustrating as you expect an "official" template would work correctly and like all the others.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 00:36:58 GMT

ITxpo: Gartner grades the Web services standards. Analyst firm positive on most specs, although weaknesses remain [InfoWorld: Top News]

"Beginning with SOAP, which received a grade of Strong Positive, the highest mark Perlstein handed out, he said that its strengths include broad vendor support, broad tool support, and is relatively easy to use.On the other hand, SOAP is still a specification, and as such has lots of security holes and scalability issues."

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 04:37:58 GMT

A dozen or so of us have been tossing around a lot of great ideas in the Groove Experiments shared space. One of our concerns, of course, is how to seemlessly share our findings publically with a wide public mechanism. Tonight, we decided to re-focus completly in a new direction, one direction. We felt that instead of continuing to be somewhat abstract that it would be better to take one of our ideas, discuss it, form requirements, and start writing code! We have decided to focus on a Groove to Weblog interface. We do realize that there have been two previous partial implementations that we will be looking at: Tim Knipp's Blogger Tool and the Agora Groovelog. One of the members is looking into those two. We realize that this kind of dump from me here now is not optimal. Ideally we would like to have things available in real-time as they happen publically. Maybe this Tool or Solution will go a long way toward that.

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 17:37:11 GMT

Sam Ruby: "I'm pleased to announce the Apache SOAP engine known as Axis just had it's first release. Performance, interoperability, and JAX RPC compliance have been significant focuses of this effort. Download it here." Yay! Congrats Sam! Can't wait to learn more about this at the DevCon.