Justin Rudd's Radio Weblog

As everyone probably knows, Userland was pretty wack today. I'm waiting to find out how to get my entries republished without having to generate new entries. If anyone knows, could you clue me in?

Message passing or distributed objects?. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric]

Hm...do I currently work for a company that uses messages or distributed objects? Ask marketing and they say messages (ask them why they believe that and I get a blank stare). Ask engineering and I get a blank stare. :-) What do I believe? I believe that we are using a messaging system.

With a messaging system, I can route on subject (i.e. the SOAPAction) or I can route on content (i.e. the FQN of the body element or a particular SOAP header). Messaging to me is sending data from one location to another with anonymity. Processing it along the way (or just routing it to the next location). It is also inherently asynchronous. I fire the message into the ether and it gets processed. Maybe sometime later I get a response or maybe I never do. Messaging lends itself to the publish/subscribe paradigm as well. I can subscribe to some message store that will give me all the messages with a specific content or subject. Tuple spaces are a good example of this. In fact RogueWave has an XML Space called Ruple.

But to answer Ingo's question - "where would you draw the line between a distributed object system and message based one?" - I use messages to move data between disparate systems. For example, when I receive a packet of data from the GPRS network, I put it into a queue for someone else to process. Part of that processing may require tremendous resources. There I might use a distributed object to move that processing to one particular machine (or cluster of machines).

In closing - remember in the good ol' days of OOP programming (as told by one of my professors), no one called it "calling a method". They called it "sending a message". Allen Holub used this nomenclature all the time in his writings[1].

[1]I use the past tense here because I haven't read any of his recent works.

"Since the REST gods have yet to smite me, I figured I would tempt fate with a little essay: Google's Genius".[Sam Ruby]

Very good essay. It seems that I am not crazy in thinking that SOAP is the wire protocol.

One of my favorite lines from the essay - "To pick a wire format for which there are dozens of toolkits poised to directly translate the protocol into readily consumable bits".

Microsoft spills the beans on Topaz [IDG InfoWorld]

Another tool that would make my life easier at my bill paying job. But will I get it? Of course not.

I've been reading quotes from here for awhile now. I read one a while back (3 or 4 months) that I could never find again. Well...if you generate random quotes long enough you will find the one you want...

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
- Mark Twain

Mark Baker emailed me to point out what the issue with RPC part of SOAP and REST is [thanks Mark]. So are people using SOAP in the messaging style ?, I don't know of a single toolkit that defaults to messaging style SOAP [I discount ASP.NET in this case, as although it defaults to doc/literal SOAP, the messages it defines have RPC semantics] [Simon Fell]

I'm using ASP.NET in a messaging format. I use the parameter style bare so that the runtime doesn't "wrap" my message with the nonsense that it uses. This gives me complete control over the type of XML body that I process. Then I can move that message into my existing framework.

I can also only assume that ASP.NET is discounted because out of the box it will match elements to parameters of the method. This is both fortunate and unfortunate. As I mentioned in an early post, I like frameworks that hide the details from me. But hiding these details can be dangerous if you ignore what is going on behind the scenes.

Interview: Ozzie's Groove moves toward edge services [IDG InfoWorld]

Cool. Although I must say I am waiting for more interesting use cases than P2P blogging.

The SOAP Data Model and soon the XSD Data Model are the wire protocol. Am I misguided in believing this?

My idea is simple. At least I think it is. SOAP (either section 5 or XSD) is the wire protocol. And it is a 2 year old protocol. As tools start to interop better (there is some great work being done on this front today), the need to look at what is on the wire will be moot. Just like we don't look at other remoting packets anymore. But the protocol is 2 years old. Give it some time.

I realize that the more you hide the more "danger" you can put people into. I'm sure most seasoned distributed developers have run across that remote interface that has a bunch of properties and cringed. Guess what? We'll see the same thing again. It's a given.

Me? I'm going to move along with my ISAPI framework that works with the XSD Data Model. I'm in the middle of moving pieces of it to ASP.NET. When ASP.NET can handle everything I want (and it probably can, just haven't figured it all out yet), then I'll dump my ISAPI framework and use ASP.NET exclusively. Will I look back? Nope. Got better things to do with my time.

Hoorah!! I finally got my personal site up and running with XHTML and CSS! Check it out! I went with a very minimal site this time around. No pictures. Only text. I also kept all the old FogCreek CityDesk file names. I did this because some people have links to me. So far I haven't seen any problems from the few referers that I've verified. If you run into any dead links out there could you let me know?

PocketSOAP 1.3 ships !.

[Simon Fell]

Congratulations Simon!!

A blog that I will be paying attention to. I like Groove. I love the fact that they are working on being able to make SOAP end-points out of client machines. I like it so much...I applied...Still haven't heard from them :(

I have a dilemma (sorry not a technical dilemma). I am looking for a new car. I currently have a 2000 Toyota MR2 Spyder. This is a FUN car. It handles like a dream over the twisty mountain roads here in Arizona. And it gets fairly decent gas mileage even when I drive it hard (28 mpg). But it is so not pratical. It has no trunk. So my wife and I can't run any impromptu errands. But on the plus side when we are in the car it keeps our impulse buys to a minimum :-)

So anyway, after driving it for 2 years we are ready to get rid of it. Right now I have a very short list (1) of cars that I'm looking at. At the top is the Volkswagon Jetta TDI. The TDI is a diesel. Before you start calling Green Peace on me, you should know that a diesel is as clean or cleaner than a gasoline engine for certain types of emissions. Check out this page for details.

Anyway, I test drove one and liked it a lot. I couldn't corner like I can in my MR2 (mid-engine cars are a dream for cornering), but it had equivalent torque for get-up-and-go. What I'm wondering is if anyone has anything bad to say about a TDI? If so, could you let me know?

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

I read this quote tonight, and I couldn't help but think of all the raging debates that have been going on about SOAP vs. REST. One such debate I participated in with Paul Prescod on Joel's discussion forum here. Paul gratiously congratulated me on "...having a sense of what SOAP is.". I take this compliment with a grain of salt. Not because it came from Paul. I've read some of Paul's other articles, and he is very passionate about what he believes and that is a trait I truly admire in people.

The reason I take it with a grain of salt is because I don't believe I know anything about SOAP. I'm not a plumber (a term that Peter Drayton has brought new meaning to here). I've read the SOAP 1.1 spec a couple of times, implemented a basic SOAP framework, etc. but I don't believe that makes me enlightened. I see the SOAP Data Model (and in the very near future the XSD Data Model) as the wire transport. I compare it to DCOM, RMI, or CORBA. I really don't care what the DCOM packet looks like. The only thing I care about is that it gets mapped onto my nice little method in C++. Don't get me wrong. I like REST because it is very easy to explain and document. It's just a URI.

Of course there are problems with the SOAP Data Model as many (smarter) people have pointed out. This makes interop tricky. But again many (smarter) people are working together to make interop a reality. I believe once we get smarter XML Parsers that understand XSD, that interop will be even easier. But as far as I'm concerned, I just want the plumbing to call my C++ method. I really don't care what it looks like on the wire.

Quick note - I just got an e-mail asking why my tagline is "News from the forest". It probably doesn't make much sense considering the color and background of this blog. It comes from my personal site - www.pinetree-tech.com. The name for that domain comes from the fact that I grew up on a Tree Farm. Yep...a tree farmer turned programmer...

I've spent some time today looking at all the different tools I use for web content. By web content, I mean blogging, writing articles, and managing my personal site. Right now I use Radio for this blog (obviously), and I use the CityDesk Content Management System for managing my personal site.

Radio works great for blogs, but doesn't look like it would work to well for doing complete management of my site. This is fine. Probably not what it was intended to be used for.

CityDesk works well for blogging and site management (excellent site management tool), but it bugs me about the type of HTML that it will generate and the fact that it is CSS ignorant (in version 1.0).

I'm trying to move my personal site over to XHTML and CSS. To do this, I've switched to using Textpad and a custom tool to write the XHTML and CSS. I still use CityDesk to manage the site for me, but I do not use it to write the content for the site anymore. Of course, the main problem I run into is updating the page after I've added it to CityDesk. I have to be careful not to switch to HTML view because it will screw up my XHTML. I'm actually thinking about writing my own content managment system...

Oh yeah...I'm going to release my XHTML version of my site sometime tomorrow...

"Welcome to the wonderful word of blogging", I say to myself. This is my initial blog entry. Not too sexy, I know. I've never been enamored to the idea of blogging. But recently it has dawned on me that blogging has become the new way to communicate. No one uses e-mail anymore (except maybe for what is private). I've also noticed over the past few weeks that I've gotten wrapped up in following links between Sam Ruby, Peter Drayton, Sam Gentile and many many others. So now I join the fray.

I probably won't have near as many interesting things to say. But at least I am saying them. I'm not keeping them bottled up inside anymore.