Month: October 2002

Web Services DevCon Report: Day 2

Don Box: Types

Don’s an amazing speaker, and the fact that he gets off on tangents and gets off topic is quite allright by me.  Any time you see a Microsoft guy working in Emacs, it’s a good day.  He made us think about types by looking at languages that don’t come to mind when we think: “web services.”  He used C and SQL to illustrate some gotchas.  I’d pay money to hear Don talk again.

Yasser Shohoud: Building Web Services the Right Way

I think he drove home something that I had been hearing throughout the conference: Write your WSDL first, have your toolkit generate some stubs, and fill in the gaps from there.  If things are done this way, you can assure that what is going over the wire is what you want.  He’s not down with stuff generating WSDL on the fly.  I can see how that can eff up interop sometimes.  His talk got to me, and I’ll have to devote more time and energy ranting on this later.  He noted that there aren’t very many if any decent WSDL editors out there.  You can edit XSD (Xml Schema Documents) in Visual Studio .NET, but you can’t gracefully edit XML.  Same for many other toolkits.  Trust me, I’ll get back to this later.

David Seidel & Mark Ericson: Web Services Diagnostics

These two guys work for Mindreef and they had a version of their product that has not shipped yet.  Their product makes debugging and keeping track of what’s going on between web services easier.  The great thing about their talk ist hat they mentioned several other tools that offer partial solutions, many of them free.  They pointed to several of Simon Fell’s tools, but their tool was extremely slick too.  It showed the raw XML going over the wire, but you can also convert it to pseudocode to get a grasp on it.  This is good for all those people out there that don’t like angle brackets.

Andres Agular: Deklarit & Web Services

Andres demonstrated some “wicked cool” stuff, integrating web services with his companies product.  The thought of having a Visual Studio plugin handle all of your database normalization and stuff is cool, and that’s one of the things his product does.  I have a feeling that I’d get myself in trouble with a tool like this, but I’m sure it’ll definately make some lives easier somewhere.

Tim Ewald: Programming Web Services with System.Xml

Tim’s crazy.  Crazy in a good way.  He likes having low-level access to XML and thinks that we should be able to see and manipulate whatever is going on at the XML-over-the-wire level.  He hacked up some fairly low-level stuff that seemed like more trouble than it was worth to me, but it was cool nontheless.  I agree with him that the world doesn’t need any more SOAP stacks.  He also used some web methods stuff that I didn’t pay close enough attention to in order to grok it 100%.

Eugene Kuznetsov: Network Infrastructure for Web Services

This was a good counterpoint to all of the brain-hurting code that had been flying by the screen so far today.  He dealt with the problems that we run into with web services at an infrastructure level.  Firewalls and load balancers need to be more and more complex in order to handle stuff like SOAP DOS attacks and figuring out which server a SOAP request needs to head off to.  He noted that many public web services are vulnerable to attacks, and noted that things don’t look great but that they have the potential to improve.

Keith Ballanger: Web Services Security in .NET

Screw Powerpoint presentations, when you’re Keith you can just do your presentation in an XML tree.  This was cool.  He introduced Microsoft’s WSDK: Web Services Design Kit (or something like that).  It implements a bunch of waay cool stuff using WS-Security and stuff like that.  This is definately an area I’d like to study more.  I’m particularly curious about how SOAP interop works once you start throwing WS-Security stuff.  Note to self: check this stuff out.

Clemens Vasters: Tales from the Labs

Clemens had some of the coolest undocumented feature hacking of the conference.  He did amazing whacky stuff in a modular fashion that involves some of the security issues that we had spoken about earlier.  The cool thing is that he added tons and tons of functionality in an easy to use fashion.  Just add a [CheckArguments] line above your code and a little [between(1,100)] in there, and WHAM! you’ve got range checking and stuff like that.

Rich Salz: What Web Services Needs to Know About PKI

Rich kinda scared me with the things he told me about certificate checking.  I didn’t know that most browsers nowadays just check to see if your SSL certificate is registered with a trusted certificate authority, and don’t bother to check if your certificate has been revoked or anything like that.  Quite scary.  He also spoke about a bunch of basic cryptography that I already knew most of, but I’m sure it was informative for others.  A lot of stuff is much different in reality than it looks like on paper.

Holy shit!  This stupid little kiosk supports tabbed browsing!

I’m such a moron.  I trekked across the hotel to the internet kiosk and completely forgot to bring my notes.  I’ll be back in a few as long as I can make it to my room and back…

Bloggers and Observations

I met several fellow bloggers today.  It was great to finally put a face to many people that I feel like I know personally after reading their blogs for several months.  I don’t think anybody was as I expected them.  Not that I really had any idea about what anybody looked like anyway.

I also met several people from Groove Experiments, which was excellent also.  I spoke to someone that works at Groove during lunch, and the stuff that is potentially in the pipelines rates high on the COOL-O-METER.

The overall tone from the speakers at the panel discussion was that web services will soon be a commodity.  It doesn’t look like anyone’s going to be rich and famous from this stuff, but it definately looks like it’s going to creep into our everday lives.  It’ll be just another tool that nobody will think twice about using.  I thought that was interesting.

The IBM guys and Microsoft guys are doing a pretty good job at poking fun at each other in a lighthearted way without being mean spirited.

I know now that Sam Ruby is a hardcore geek.  Someone asked him a question, and after getting into an answer, he said, “Can I push that [on the stack] and come back?”

WSDL (web services description language) seemed to be the buzzword of the day, but I don’t really see that as a bad thing.  WSDL does a lot to make SOAP services available, describing them so they can be used by a client, testing via a web interface, and helping to generate some basic code (stubs) that can be implemented later.

I loved Peter Drayton’s interpretation of the “/” character.  HTTP:// is translated to HTTP colon bang bang.  It makes for more interesting conversation.

Steve Loughran also pointed to a whitepaper he wrote, which is available at www.hpi.hp.com called “Making Web Services that Work.”  This is definate hotel room reading material.

I’m having a blast and learning a ton.  I’m sure you’ll hear more from me later.

Web Services DevCon Report: Day 1

Sam Ruby: Interop is All

Sam started off the day with a great keynote speech.  He noted some problems with SOAP interop from the past, and what everybody is trying to do to fix them.  He noted something quite interesting about web services/network/distributed computing: If you control both ends of the wire, don’t use SOAP.  It’s not exactly efficient, but if interop is what you want, SOAP is for you.

He also noted a project that he and Mark Pilgrim have been working on recently: an RSS validator written in Python.  He noted that he also will expose a web service for this, and the actual implementation was extrememly simple and compact, and didn’t use a SOAP stack, just kinda picked off the XML that it needed.  I can’t wait to find out more about this.

Glen Daniels: Apache Axis

Good stuff.  It was an overview of Axis, Apache’s SOAP stack, without being preachy.  He works for Macromedia, but is allowed to work on Axis because it is incorporated in Macromedia’s JRun.  He touched on open source briefly without making it a religous thing.

Peter Drayton: Designing a RESTful SOAP API

Another blogger in the house, Peter was the first person I’ve ever heard a logical explination of REST from.  Aparently it’s the way that web app guys do things.  I’ve been trying to figure that out forever.  He also noted the differences between SOAP and REST without making it a Mac vs. PC or Windows vs. Linux thing, which I think is amazing.

Steve Loughran: When Web Services Go Bad

Steve works for HP, and it showed by his slides, which looked like an HP inkjet cartridge box.  Don’t let that fool you, he had one of the best presentations of the day.  He gave a talk about deploying a real-world web service using XML-RPC (something that’s a bit overlooked nowadays, IMHO).  He noted that coding the web service side can sometimes be easy, but sometimes the code and platform that you are given (and told that works) can cause you more headaches that your own stuff.  He doesn’t like anyone in operations, because it seems that they’ve made his life fairly misable at times.  I wouldn’t mind hearing him speak again sometime.

Noah Mendelsohn: W3C XML Schema

A good overview of XML Schema and XML Schema Documents (XSD) in the context of web services.  He also gave an overview of why some of the things are as they are with Schemas.

Scott Seeley: Inheritance

A good tutorial on how to expose multiple services using base classes and derived classes in .NET (and a little in Java), which was interesting coming from a Microsoft guy.  His talk was a little heavy on the code, but I don’t know of any other way to express the stuff he needed to without it.

Dr. Aleskey Nudelman: Web Services in the Doctor’s Office

I wasn’t particularly thrilled by this talk, I’m not sure if it was because it was just before lunch, or if I just wasn’t interested in it.  I do know that the medical industry has some crappy protocols and fears change.

Chris Dix: XSLT, .NET and Web Services

Chris is a sick puppy.  He’s implemented a web service that only uses .NET for input and output, all of the transformations and stuff are done in XSLT.  It’s a great proof of concept, but I’m not sure how useful it is.  He did mose of this on his own time, and it looks like he put a lot of work in it.  It’s impressive getting XSLT to do the things he has.  Props.

There was also a discussion panel that was great, but I’ll have to get into that later.  I need to get this posted before my time runs out.  Much more later, and it was great to meet all the bloggers and other pople I’ve met today.

Just a few minutes left

This dialup kiosk *choked* on my news aggregator page in Radio.  I’ve read pretty much everything from 3pm onward, but I’m running out of time.  I’ll have to read the backlog once I get in front of a computer that can pop up 15-20 windows or tabs.

Time to secure some snackage.

Arrival

I’m here.  It took the cab driver for-ever to find the place.  Everything went well, happyfun flight on a Boeing 717-200, Airport fast food at Roy Rogers, and blogging at a kiosk for $.20/min.  How much better can it get?

I really need to venture out to find some food, I don’t think I’ve had anything besides pretzels since this afternoon.  Airplane pretzels, you know– the kind you get with your cocktail cup of soda.  Yeah, I fly discount airlines, can’t afford much more.  I’ll be flying round trip for just over $116, so I can’t complain.

Things kick off in the morning, and hopefully I’ll be able to blog them either on pen and paper and update at least once or twice a day.  Next thing like this I do is going to require a new laptop, nationwide dialup service, maybe some 802.11 fun.  But for now, I’m poor, and I’m more than happy to be here.  Any respectful blogging addict would pay waaay more than $.20/min for internet access, but don’t tell that to anyone.

Anyway, I’m outta here, maybe I’ll run into some webloggers tonight, but more likely I’ll have to meet y’all in the morning, as I don’t have a clue what many/most of you look like.

Reporing from Bedford, Mass, this is Matt Croydon.  🙂

Scramble!

Must… Get… Ready… For… Boston!

Greg Klebus has been having problems with his SV25 setup:

This is only to let you know that INDY, and my not blogging for a coupleof days was caused by my fantastic SV25 server, which I’ve been strugglingto get up and running.

I’m sure he’ll get things figured out.  In the SV25’s defense, I’m sure it’s much more powerful than the Via Eden 500MHz that I’m running.

Today is Eldred day.

That’s about it for the night.  I have convinced my ancient Pentium laptop (Win95) to take a LAN card, as well as continue to support the 14.4 modem that’s in there.  I’m going to try to find some prepaid dialup access that will work on Win95 with my hardware.  Otherwise I have to dial in long distance to my home box for access.

I wish I could float a grand or two to buy a new laptop for this conference, I’m going to be hurting without decent web access, groove, disk space, and stuff.  I’ll be bringing pen and paper as well as this crappy laptop.  I’m sure the batteries won’t last too long, so I may end up transcribing my notes/blog entries. 

I can’t wait to meet everybody at the DevCon!

Plan for the morning/early afternoon:

• Get up
• Check RSS feeds/mail
• Pack/Breakfast/Shower etc
• Go to school
• Find some prepaid net access
• Get on a plane

Ray Ozzie on localhost web services

Sam Ruby:

For a preview of Thursday’s keynote at the devcon, see Mark Pilgrim‘s In praise of evolvable formats.  That might also explain the apparent obsession of late on the topic of RSS.  Hopefully I still have a few novel ideas left that you won’t see first on Mark’s blog.

Applying Groove Experiments

As I’m getting stuff together for my flight tomorrow (to attend the Web Services DevCon), I’m thinking about Groove Experiments.  How awesome would it be to have a Groovespace for each of the sessions at an event/conference and having the content of that space stream out to a publicly accessable weblog in real time?  Several people could get together in a Groovespace after (or even during) a presentation to flesh out topics outlined in the presentation.  We could take the next logical step.  We could write code.  We could unleash it on the world.

Many webloggers will be attending the DevCon.  We will get coverage from many people, but what would it be like if everything was aggregated in one space, with discussion, notes, code snippets, and images right there for everyone?

I’m tempted to use blosxom and blagg to aggregate everyone’s blog entries, but working in a Groovespace would just rock!

Scott Hanselman:

‘ToDo: Unsigned Integers not supported

Ever wonder what happens when you try to port low-level code from C# to VB.NET?

Kenneth Hunt points to a micro-atx dual Athlon-MP motherboard.  Rock on!  How about a dual VIA Eden board?  🙂

Peter Drayton on Groove:

If the experimentation with Groove/weblog integration helps us to more seamlessly transition from collaboration to communication and back again, it will advance the state of the discourse, which is goodness.

O’Reillynet: Securing Linux: Why It’s Worthwhile and Achievable:

I don’t presume to know in any definitive way whether Linux is more or less securable than other Unix variants. What I do know is this: Linux is useful, stable, and securable enough to warrant the time and effort required to “harden” it against Internet threats. This article explains some of the reasons I believe it’s both possible and worthwhile to secure Linux for use as an Internet server platform.

Are you a smartass?  Design the JIRA 2.0 tshirt and get a couple.

My entry: JIRA 2.0 – We could have called it Javaanal!

This is when I start getting really weird goggle searches in my referral log, isn’t it?

Sam Gentile:

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.