Mark Pilgrim:

I ranted about Google, which got me written up in Wired (which was great fun), which got me misrepresented in The Register, which got me to rant about The Register, which got someone else to write to a letter to The Register, which got other Register readers to click through to my original rants, which got my “Further reading” script to notice The Register’s letters to the editor and include an excerpt in my “Further reading” RSS feed, which got my homegrown news aggregator to send me an email with the excerpt and the link to The Register’s letters to the editor, which kept me on top of the infinitesimal fraction of this glorious, ongoing, worldwide conversation that points my way, which is what I wanted.

Push To Test has some open source software for testing SOAP-based web services.  They have released Load and TestMaker.  Here’s a description of Load from the freshmeat page:

Load is a utility for Web application and SOAP-based Web services performance and scalability testing. It features a scripting language and a library of test objects for the creation of intelligent agents that drive the Web application or SOAP-based Web service. Running hundreds of agents concurrently shows how your software performs in production environments. Load is a Java application that runs on Linux, Solaris, NT, Win2000, and Macintosh. While Load continues to be maintained, the next generation is the TestMaker program.

Power

We had a power outage this evening.  All of my machines that were on except for my Via Eden were on UPS.  The built-in ethernet adapter seems to have been fried.  It’s enabled in the bios, and Red Hat claims to bring it up, but it won’t sync to the NTP server.  I get no lights on either end.  It’s not the port on my switch and it’s not the cable.  I guess I might have to break out a NIC and use the PCI slot.  This makes it a heck of a lot less compact if I ever get a case for it.

O’Reillynet: .NET Localization, Part 2: Creating Satellite Assemblies.

One time in .NET that you need to know about satellite assemblies is when you are dealing with localization. For localizing text, one doesn’t hard code text on a page, but uses a key for that text. The text equivalent for the key is retrieved from a file called a resource file. A resource file is essentially a dictionary of associations between the keys and their textual values. You will have this resource file duplicated once for each language that you support. .NET will retrieve values from these multiple language-resource files based on the chosen language context.

LWN:

The release of Python 2.2.2 is here.  This is a fully backwards compatible bugfix release for Python 2.2.1.

O’Reillynet: C# News Ticker Multithreaded Application

Writing multithreaded applications is one of the more advanced topics in computer programming. Fortunately, the .NET Framework makes it a piece of cake by hiding the complexity in the classes in the System.Threading framework. This article shows you how to create a news ticker by using the System.Threading.Thread class. Its main purpose is to demonstrate how easy multithreaded programming can be.

Another Shooting

All I can do is extend my sympahy to the family of a person I’ve never met, and never will.

I saw more than twelve police cars with their lights on doing laps around the beltway.  There were at least six police cars sitting on the side of the road with all of their lights out.  I don’t know what more to say.

Ingo got me.  A picture of me, anyway.  If you’re curious about what I look like, there I am.  And Ingo pointed to Brian Jepson’s notes from the DevCon.  Here’s day 1 and here’s day 2.

I’m sorry, I’ve temporarily lost the will to blog.  Hopefully it’s just exhaustion and I’ll resume tomorrow.

Brian Graf:

I want more.

I want to contribute something tangible to this industry.

I want to research things that are technologically interesting.

I want to write essays, articles and books.

I want deep knowledge of topics.

Michael Helfrich:

Sounds like Groove.

I’m back on the ground. The real work will resume tomorrow.

That’s about it for tonight.  I know that I’ll write a lot more once all this information gets sorted out in my brain.  I had diinner with a gaggle of bloggers after the conference.  I had a blast.  This was a great experience.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Top 10 Ways You Know that you Attended Web Services DevCon East

• 10. Dude!  He said Assemex!
• 9. You saw a Microsoft guy program in Emacs
• 8. You saw someone build a Java project with VBScript
• 7. Whizzdull (the proper pronounciation for WSDL) is part of your vocabulary
• 6. You were not suprised when Chris Sells stood on a chair and yelled for attention
• 5. You know about SOAPerman (thanks Clemens)
• 4. You waited in line at the mens room
• 3. You don’t support MustUnderstand.
• 2. You heard something and thought: “I have to post that to my weblog”
• 1. You are looking forward to reading Mr. Bunny’s Guide to SOAP

My apologies, it all sounded much funnier in my head.

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.