My friend Yuhong is organizing a Workshop on Service Oriented Techniques at ICEC06. Yuhong is cool and the workshop looks quite respectable so if you are into this sort of thing, consider submitting a paper!

Service oriented techniques are used for building software applications that use services available in a network such as the Web. The driving forces come from both the software engineering community and the e-business community. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) promotes loose coupling between software components so that interoperability across programming languages and platforms can be achieved. Extending the classic middleware functions, SOA techniques incorporate the demands of e-business by adding process modelling and management functions. The description of services covers not only software interfaces but also semantic business information. Services can be dynamically discovered and composite services can be built from aggregates of other services.

The aim of the SOT workshop is to present recent research findings on service oriented techniques. We welcome papers from both academia and industry. We especially invite submissions based on theoretical foundations or innovative industrial projects. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:

* Formal methods for service modelling and computing
* Dynamic selection and composition of services/applications
* Dynamic coordination of services/applications
* Managing and monitoring services/applications
* QoS-enabled services/applications
* Data integration of distributed services
* Selection and interaction among services
* Context-aware services/applications
* Performance evaluation of middleware for service-oriented computing
* Semantic Issues in service integration
* Combinations of Semantic Web technology with Web Services
* Innovative applications

Some anti-McDo activists have come up with a “The Sims”-like McDonald’s Videogame. My wife spent the week-end playing. I think she managed to take the company up until 2045. The graphics and sounds are gorgeous and the simulation is really interesting. Appears to be Flash driven. I usually dislike Flash for web site design, especially corporate web sites, but this is one instance where Flash really shines. (Source.)

As part of CS6905, I lecture from my basement near Montreal, to New Brunswick in Easter Canada. Sounds crazy? Well, according to my collaborators, this works well for everyone involved. We use webhuddle to broadcast the lectures. We are short of a video stream, but it seems that it is not a critical flaw.

If, like me, you prepare your slides using LaTeX, then you have a small problem because webhuddle expects either PowerPointish files or a zip file containing JPG or GIF images. Don’t go for JPG images as they are too big when your slides are mostly text and a flat background. Here’s a script to convert a PDF file into a bunch of GIF files (it can be improved upon):


pdftoppm $1 $1ppm
listoffiles=""
for i in $1ppm*.ppm
do
echo "converting file " $i
convert -resize 800x600 $i $i.gif
listoffiles=$i".gif "$listoffiles
echo "you can now delete "$i
done
echo "now zipping "$listoffiles
zip -9 $1.zip $listoffiles
echo "zip file is "$1.zip


Tim Bray wrote this morning: “I think the WS-stench of something WS-rotting from the WS-head down is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.” This is coming from the inventor of things like XML and Atom: while he might be wrong, he sures knows a lot about XML technologies so maybe we ought to listen to the man.

For a year now, we’ve had people realizing the web services are too complex for their own good, Tim Bray even said last year that the WS-* stack is bloated, opaque, and insanely complex. We’ve been told to drop the SOAP because it is not scalable.

Ok. It is complex and poorly scalable, but it works, right? I mean, totally different systems from different vendors like, say, Sun and Microsoft, are made to play together using the WS stack, right? I assumed so up until recently. You see, I’ve never touched .NET and I don’t have to interact with .NET applications, so how would I know? Well, I can read what experience people have it with it.

To me, the fact that Web Services are based on XML Schema has always been a bad sign, because even very smart people have trouble working with XML Schema, but what I had not realized until now is that XML Schema actually leads to deep and serious interoperability issues, which I find very amusing:

• The main problem with WS-* interop is that vendors decided to treat it as a distributed object programming technology but based it on a data typing language (i.e. XSD) which does not map at all well with traditional object oriented programming languages. (Source.)
• With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it was a bad idea to try and abstract away application protocols using RPC calls tied to verbose, rigid, statically-typed languages mapped with a Rube Goldberg schema language that has a more flexible type system than said languages. (Source.)

What interoperability? Well, on the one hand, we have Java and on the other, we have .NET. Minimally, the WS stack was supposed to get these two technologies to talk to each other easily. It doesn’t. It has failed. In practice, you are better off choosing either .NET or Java:

My recent experience (in which I was shocked how little interoperability, not to mention functionality, has been accomplished in the WSDL and SOAP world over the last several years) tells me that if the target is either dotnet *or* java then your chances are significantly better than targetting both. (Source.)

So, if WS doesn’t buy you interoperability, if it is complex and not scalable, why bother? Oh! Why?

(I have a comment section open. Shoot! Convince me!)

I’m a vim user myself, and I’m unlikely to switch, but I find this claim that Eclipse is fast becoming the dominant non-Visual Studio IDE interesting:

Here is my prediction: In five years Eclipse will be used in 70% of enterprise development regardless of the programming language (excluding Microsoft .NET languages). In 10 years, there will be a small cottage industry of commercial eclipse plug-ins but for the most part everyone who is not developing to the Microsoft platform, will be using open source Eclipse. In fact, I anticipate that Eclipse will invade non-enterprise tooling markets such as IDEs for embedded devices by that time. Like it or not, for the next 20 years the future of the IDE market appears to be Eclipse.

What is good here is that this dominant IDE is free software started out by a big bad company (IBM). What is somewhat surprising is that this is a client-side Java application though, we have to point it out, it doesn’t use Swing!

I think people feel the need for IDEs mostly because the languages or the API they use are not what they ought to be. A good language and a good API should not require wizards automatically generating code. But, sometimes, you have to live with Java or C++ and there, I agree, an IDE can be of some use. To some extent, vim is an IDE, though a light one that gets out of my way. I’m one of those people who hate code completion and wizards. In the good old days, we coded assembly code using hexadecimal editors, and we liked it!