Category: Web Services

Sam Gentile:

Tim Ewald takes us inside the Web Services Enhancements Pipeline.

It’s a great article explaining what the man behind the curtain is doing.

Phillip Pearson is going for XML-RPC throughput in C++:

Prototyping a very fast (C++) XML-RPC server here. Just tested it by repeatedly calling a method from a Python script. 160 hits/second on an Athlon 1333 with the server using 17% CPU (the rest going to the Python script). That implies that it may reach almost 1000 hits/second!

Nathan Torkington reminded me of the SliMP3.  It’s got it all: MP3 playing, clean design, Ethernet and RCAs out.  I had almost forgotten about it, too.  I’ll have to get one someday.

Dan Bricklin:

This afternoon, Interland announced that they have signed a deal to acquire Trellix Corporation, the company that I founded.

Good, Dan.  I think I know more people that are not happy with Interland than are.  Hopefully Trellix won’t suffer.

Slashdot mentions that Moore’s Law has reached its limit.  You know what that means, right?  It’s time for another breakthrough in chip design.  A big one.  I can’t wait.

Matt Kennedy unleashes his essay: Learning to Program Computers:

The most difficult part of becoming a computer programmer is truly understanding what it means to “program a computer.” It’s possible to span an entire career in the industry without achieving this knowledge, but for those who do, it can often differentiate them from their peers.

Go read it.  Math, logic, learning.

Infoworld:

HOPING TO KICK-START adoption of the emerging UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) Web services specification, Novell on Wednesday introduced a UDDI server based on its eDirectory software. The offering is designed to add security and identity management capabilities to UDDI.

Dave Johnson reminds us to just say no to System.out.println.  From the Websphere best practices white paper:

Because System.out.println statements and similar constructs synchronize processing for the duration of disk I/O, they can significantly slow throughput.

Yikes.  I didn’t know that either.

Scott Storkel at OnJava has an intro to Eclipse:

Eclipse also includes a number of unique features such as code refactoring, automatic code updates/installs (via the Update Manager), a task list, support for unit testing with JUnit, and integration with the Jakarta Ant build tool.

Ingo Rammer is looking for a web designer.

Things are starting to pick up on the bloggerDev list.  The new API is being refined.  I posted to it this afternoon trying to justify (in my mind at least) the version change to 2.0.

A major release (2.x.x), IMHO, is justified when either (or both):

• Major revisions are made to the codebase or interface
• Backwards compatability is broken

Also, it’s okay to break backwards compatabiity every once in awhile.  Otherwise we’d spend too much time supporting the 1.0 release than implementing new features.  It does look like Steve is going to do his best to keep backwards compatibility with the Blogger API (1.0), tho it will definately be considered deprecated when the 2.0 API is finalized..

Richard Caetano is back:

As a new project on StronglyTyped, I started a section called Refactorings in C#.  This area will tie in closely with Martin Fowler’s book Refactoring.  I’m hoping to solidify my refactoring vocabulary with this project.  My goal is to cover 2 or 3 refactorings a week.  We’ll see how that goes =)

I’m looking forward to it.

Juha doesn’t think that the new Powerbook G4 is all that noisy.  I was in my local Apple store a few weeks ago and looked at the Powermac G4 desktops.  Man, they’re hurricanes compared to the older blue & white G3’s and Quicksilver and below G4’s that I’ve been used to.  It’s still a lot quieter than my main desktop machine (a 3dcool Tornado 1000 case with 4 fans), but it struck me as an ugly kind of unmaclike noisy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d still buy one in an instant if I had the funds.

Steve Jenson is going to change the prefix to the Blogger2 API to blogger2.*.  This was the first thing that jumped out to me as a problem.  So it looks like the Blogger API and Blogger2 API will coexist.  This is both good and crucial.  It looks like Steve is taking suggestions quite well.  Several things that were suggested are going to be rolled into the Blogger2 API.

Wow, I got linked in Japanese by Ryuji Abe [site translated to English] in The diary formerly known as Go ahead make my day:

I’ll assume that Ryuji wasn’t calling me names and say thanks for the link. (Babelfish says: “By portable telephone blog”).  Ryuji’s site runs on a GPL’d program called hns (or the Hyper NIKKI System).  I don’t see any references to RSS, so I can’t keep track of this blog in my aggregator.  There are some good links in there.  Time to add something else to my list: learn Japanese before I die.  For the short term, perhaps I should break out some script-fu and scrape the babelfish translations once a day and spit out some (valid) RSS.  His diary reads much like an Advogato diary: Projects, Links, Life.

Being the stupid American that I am, I just found out from Ryuji that there is a Slashdot Japan [rdf].  The eerie part: there’s a poll without CowboyNeal as an answer.

DaveNet: Weblog is Meatspace.  Let me know when, let me know where.  I’ll go to that left coast if I have to.  It’s hard to compromise on a specific place when you’re trying to accomidate a world full of bloggers.

We should create a web app (with XML-RPC, SOAP, and REST interfaces, of course) that allows any blogger interested in attending WIM to ping with their location.  Then take that data and figure out where the geographic middle of that is.  It’ll change as more people ping, of course.  Where can I vote on the 24 hour day extensibility issue?

Sam Ruby on REST:

Mark Baker: Figure out what are the identifiable objects in your system, give them all URIs, and make sure they answer GET requests. Much of REST will flow naturally from that.  That is a good first step.  The next step is to agree on common representations.  Sometimes consensus can be reached on these representations, and that is goodness.  Otherwise, extensibility and/or discovery mechanisms may be helpful in providing the right amount of coupling.

And then:

You want to catch my interest?  Say it in on a weblog.

 

RxLinux 1.2.2 has been released:

Rxlinux is a modular system. The base system fits in 25M of RAMdisk. Extra packages (software) can be installed on demand in RAMdisk. The /var partition which contains the application data can reside either on a hard disk or in RAMdisk. Rxlinux can be configure as a Web server, an X11 terminal, a database server, an openmosix cluster node, etc. It is distributed as a 10M bootable ISO file. You can configure it to include more packages in the ISO if you don’t want to download extra software at boot time.

The changes are also really cool:

Three new packages have been added: Jboss, Tomcat, and Jdk. Jdk as been bundled as a compressed ISO file (ziso), and can be mounted directly from the CDROM or installed in a RAMdisk. Rxlinux can now be customized as a diskless Web application server. A few minor bugs have been fixed. More code cleanup was done.

I must say, that RxLinux looks like a pretty wicked way to put legacy hardware with a little bit of ram to use.  I know that there’s a machine around here somewhere that is just begging to have RxLinux on it.  I also like the openmosix clustering support.

Les Orchard (0xDECAFBAD) has hacked together a personal web proxy in Python.  He’s having fun working in a language that he hasn’t spent a lot of time in.  I’ve recently had similar fun romping in Perl and C#.  I’ve always used Perl for a few things around the *nix boxes, but nothing like the little wapblog script I hacked up the other day.  Similarly, I’ve been partying in C#, which seems (java) so (java) errily (java) familiar, but is just different enough to feel new.  I will give C# and .NET props for taking a good base and improving upon it.  From what I’ve been reading in the java.blog community, Java is trying to catch up to C# in some areas.

And while I’m on the topic of Java, I’m still not over learning Java 1.0/1.1/AWT just to find out that EVERYTHING was different for 1.2+/Swing.  I’m still a bit bitter about that, though I don’t usually hold a grudge.  I’m almost over it now.  Okay, I’m overreacting.  I was young and impressionable back then, and the switch from AWT to Swing was a big deal when I was learning Java.

Paul Krill at Infoworld covers open source web services:

Open source presents a viable option for developing Web services if developers are willing to work with tools that are not as easy to use as commercial products, a consultant said during a Web services conference here Tuesday.

There’s more in the article, including the usual interlinking to other infoworld content on the most random words possible.