WebServices.Org points to WSDL Explorer by IBM AlphaWorks.  The WSDL explorer is available online here.  Here’s a blurb from the pointer:

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Explorer is a Web application that displays WSDL files, generates views of operations, allows invocation of operations, and allows viewing of sample message flow. It enables users to compare and contrast Web services without going through the time and trouble of importing them into a heavy development tool. WSDL Explorer provides the ability to browse WSDL files, and it offers immediate access to Web service operations.

Doug Kaye:

Iterative Improvement. In a web-services world it’s often less expensive to modify a service than it is to redesign and reprint a paper form. Does this mean we can relax the usual fanatacism for the top-down design of our business processes? Can we actually plan for a more iterative design approach? In terms of version control, adding an output XML element or attribute is almost always backwards compatible, something that’s been elusive with older technologies. Just something I’ve been thinking about.

Think about that for a minute.

Keith Davens:

Joel Spolsky:

Most of the RSS subscribers are whacking me every hour, which is actually costing me cash money in excess bandwidth charges. How can I set it up so they only visit once a day? Is this an RSS option? I rarely post more than once or twice a day. Maybe I should change the RSS feed to just include headlines with links.

This is why I click “check all feeds” in my own aggregator when I feel like catching up. It runs for about a minute checking my 80+ feeds, and then displays all changes to me. I think it’s rude to be hitting someone’s site every hour automatically for no reason.

I’ve modified the way I do things so that I try to take a few minutes break from whatever I’m doing, if possible, about once an hour to catch up on my RSS feed.  I guess I’m a freak.  I use Radio’s RSS aggregator, so I’m stuck with aggregating once an hour since I’m on the road a lot.

I’m a freak, though I understand about bandwidth issues.

RSS-RPC?  RSS Services?

The thing that bothers me is that I have to download everyone’s entire RSS file in order to parse it and figure out what’s new based on timestamps and stuff.  Wouldn’t an interactive RSS make a lot of sense?  Some way to ping someone’s weblog via XML-RPC or SOAP, pass in a date/time, and get back an array of entries in well-formed RSS of only the new entries.

Russell Beattie: Three Ingredients.

IBM developerWorks: Plug a Swing-based development tool into Eclipse: How to integrate a Swing editor into the Eclipse Platform.

Learn how to integrate a stand-alone Swing-based editor into the Eclipse Platform as a plug-in. Using simple techniques, you can share resources between the Swing tool, the Eclipse Platform, and various SWT widgets — and these resources can communicate through mutual awareness. Tool vendors who want to bring Eclipse-based development tools to market with a minimal amount of re-coding will also find this article helpful. [via Linux Today]

JXTA Protocols 1.0 released. [via Hack the Planet]

Hardware Analysis posts an article about building a high-performance web server.  It gets mentioned on Slashdot.  The site now fluctuates between taking five minutes to load or not responding.  Yeah, internet.

Greg Klebus found a sweet case for the Via Eden:

I ran accross this and fell in love at first sight with the design. Just imagine a computer in a semi-transparent blue plastic breadbox from IKEA ($6.50). Way cool! If not for the nasty CD-RW drive, it would be a perfectly clean design (very iMacish).

Matt—if you’re reading this—I’d definitely go for this solution if I had a spare case-less VIA Eden.

Speaking of Matt and his VIA Eden: he seems to have lost the onboard network card due to power outage. What a bad luck. It would be a disaster for me and my Shuttle SV25, as having 2 NICs (onboard and PCI) is crucial for my box being a proxy server for other machines at home.

That’s a really slick case that doesn’t look like it would take much time to reproduce.  I should just take my Eden to Ikea some day and see what kind of fun things it fits in.  Someday 🙂

I’m a little confused about the right sequence of steps that I need to take in order to get Apache Axis to run successfully on my Linux server.  I’ve installed the JDK, Jakarta, and Axis.  The happyaxis.jsp page is quite happy, but I can’t build any projects using the Axis libraries.

I have followed the documentation to the best of my abilities.  I’m a little dissapointed at the docs, as I wasn’t really able to figure out what was going on.  I’d be referred around from one fragment of documentation to another, not sure what to do.  If I ever do get things figured out, I’ll try to post/publish/donate a howto or something like that.

Am I the only one frustrated with installing Axis?  I tried Gump, but ran into some problems getting it to run.  I’m probably misinterpreting something in the Apache docs.  Oh well.

Red Hat 8.0 Server

I installed Red Hat 8.0 as a server configuration last night on a PII350 with 128MB of RAM.  A nice install of server stuff without X, Gnome, KDE, and other stuff I don’t need on a server ran about 900MB.  Not too bad.

Dane Carlson pointed to a bunch of cool stuff yesterday and today, including a color pallete chooser, The Art of Software Development at DevShed, If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers, and Bloggers Proverbs.

Greg Reinacker: Web Services and Schema Validation.

There was a lot of talk at the DevCon about writing your web service interface first in WSDL, and then implementing it in code.  This is in contrast to the method that the current tools tend to encourage; for example, with VS.NET, you can write your code, decorate the methods with [WebMethod], and automatically generate the WSDL.  I wholeheartedly agree with the first way – define your interface first, and implement second.  There are things you can do this way that the tools just won’t do for you.

I agree, writing your WSDL first, generating stubs, and then filling them out makes tons of sense.  Read the rest of Greg’s post for more about restricting values, validating and all kinds of fun stuff.

Mikel Maron pointed to OEOne, a company with a pretty slick looking dashboard/desktop that looks slick and simple.  They have a standalone version which is an everything-in-the-box kind of thing.  They also have a desktop version which can run on top of RedHat 7.x, Mandrake 8.2 or 9.0.  Unfortunately it doesn’t run on Red Hat 8.0.  I’m booting up my Red Hat 7.x box to check it out.

The install procedure starts out pretty easily (as root):

$ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ | sh

or

$ links -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh

Then a pretty easy to use wizard pops up.  It walks you through setup, detects what packages you have, which packages it might have to delete (double check this!) and what packages it is going to install.  It installs a modded Mozilla 1.0 among other things, and the full install totalled just under 100MB for me.  It’s currently slurping RPMs over the net.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.  Install, install, install.

It changed a lot of stuff on my system, I wouldn’t reccomend it to anyone who’s already using Linux.

OnLamp: Beginning Python for Bioinformatics.  This article wins todays prize of wtf title of the day.  It makes sense, Python seems like such a ‘glue’ language to me at times, but at first glance, I didn’t understand why Python and bioinformatics were in the same sentance.

Bioinformatics, the use of computers in biological research, is the newest wrinkle on one of the oldest pursuits–trying to uncover the secret of life. While we may not know all of life’s secrets, at the very least computers are helping us understand many of the biological processes that take place inside of living things. In fact, the use of computers in biological research has risen to such a degree that computer programming has now become an important and almost essential skill for today’s biologists.

I wonder if I’m included in the fifteen or so mySubscriptions sources in the RSS Explorer Tool beta or if the script is smart enough to check for your own file.  I’ll assume the latter until I find out otherwise.  🙂

Dave Winer:

A milestone for Uncle Davey today. I released my first beta since May. It’s a brand new piece of software, written with absolutely no cigarettes. Not one. My secret is to keep a jar of Planter’s unsalted peanuts in the kitchen. Whenever I need to pause and think before implementing something I get up and get a handful of peanuts. The little walk is important for some reason. When I come back I eat the peanuts one at a time. It takes about the same amount of time as a cigarette. I used to smoke to set a pace. Now the getting up and peanut eating does the job. Anyway, I’ll link to the beta tomorrow, it’s the RSS Explorer Tool. It’s going to build a new kind of community, and should get more exposure for feeds that aren’t in the top 100.

The next Real Time & Embedded Computing Conference will be in Tysons Corner on October 31.  I went to one in Maryland a few months ago, and while there were a lot of sales pitches, there was also quite a bit of good info for free.  There are several sessions on embedded Linux, embedded Windows XP, and some other stuff.  I probably won’t be able to make it, but if you’re in the area, it’s free.

Samba 2.2.6 Released

Release Notes indicate that it is mostly a bugfix.

This is the latest stable release of Samba and the last planned release of the Samba 2.2. branch. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes.

Those crazy kids are also working on a 3.0 version, which is currently in the alpha stage.

I love the Samba logo and I use Samba everyday.  I should really order a t-shirt.

Dave Winer: Beta: RSS Explorer Tool.

From the RSS Explorer page you can view lists of subscriptions from other Radio users. Each channel or “feed” has a checkbox to the left of its name. If it’s checked, you’re already subscribed. You can choose to subscribe or unsubscribe by clicking on the Subscribe button to the right. To see a different list, choose a name from the popup menu, below, and click on the View button. [via Radio Dev]

ITWorld:

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) said Thursday will add two seats to its board of directors, a move that may help heal a rift between the group and Sun Microsystems Inc.