Next week, the WS-ResourceTransfer authors are hosting a short (2 hours) feedback session. It’s at HP in Cupertino CA. For all the details, please read the invitation. Here are the feedback agreement and the campus map mentioned in the invitation. This entry is late (we are already past the RSVP date) but as the host of the event I know that we haven’t reached the room capacity, so you can still join us. Just let me know.
Monthly Archives: November 2006
WS-RT feedback workshop
Comments Off on WS-RT feedback workshop
Filed under Everything, Standards, WS-ResourceTransfer
Too hot to count
Here is another one to file in the “lies, damn lies and statistics” category: an article dated yesterday titled “Dutch bask in warmest autumn in three centuries” that starts with “The autumn of 2006 has been the warmest in the Netherlands for over 300 years, 12.5 percent hotter than the previous year which was already a record, meteorologists said.” We find out later where this 12.5% comes from: “The average temperature for the months leading up to November 17 was up to 13.5 degrees (56 degrees F), as compared to 12 degrees last year.” Except that such percentages don’t make much sense when applied to units that have an arbitrary zero. The same calculation using Fahrenheit degrees results in only a 5% temperature rise. Use the Kelvin scale and you’re down to a paltry 0.5% rise. Now imagine that a city has a 0.5C average one year and 1.5C average the next year. That’s a 200% increase in temperature! And if you live in a place that at some point gets a 0 degree temperature average, I would recommend moving out before the next year because you’re very likely to experience a terrifying *infinite* rise (or decrease) in temperature the following year!
This article comes from Agence France-Presse. And the French education system is criticized for putting too much emphasis on Mathematics…
Filed under CrazyStats, Everything, Off-topic
The S stands for satire
The cynical view of SOAP is not new, but this piece (“The S stands for Simple” by Pete Lacey) puts it down in the best form I’ve seen so far. What makes it such a good satire is not the funny writing (“Saints preserve us! Alexander the Great couldn’t unravel that” on reading the XSD spec) but how true it is to what really took place. There was plenty of room for exaggeration to get additional comic effect but Pete staid clear of that and the resulting piece is much more powerful for it.
I am impatiently waiting for the second installment, when the poor developer gets introduced to the WS-Addressing disaster.
I love the piece, but it doesn’t mean I have given up on SOAP. The fact that there was a lot of bumping around trying to find out how SOAP is most useful is not bad per se even if the poor developer left a few handfuls of hair on the floor in the process (that’s the joy of being an early adopter, right?). Many other good technologies go through that, in fact this is what makes them good, figuring out what they should not do.
SOAP is indeed for doc exchange (not “wrapped-doc/lit”). If you need end to end security, reliability or transaction then it helps you with that. If you don’t need them but think you might need them someday then the cost of putting your message in a SOAP envelope it pretty low, so do it. If you know you won’t need that then by all means POX all you want. And BTW, while the “role” attribute is indeed useless, “mustUnderstand” is very important. In fact, it would be very nice to have something like this for any portion of the message, not just headers. And speaking of extending header goodies to the body, EPRs would be useful if they were a real mechanism for templatizing SOAP messages (any part of the message, with a way to indicate what portions are there because of the template) instead of a dispatching crutch for sub-standard SOAP stacks. And since I have switched into “Santa Claus list” mode, the other piece we need is a non-brittle XML contract language. That’s for a future blog entry.
Comments Off on The S stands for satire
Filed under Everything, SOAP, Standards, Tech
SML news
Interesting SML news today. We published an updated SML spec (PDF, XSD) and, more importantly, a first version of the SML-IF (PDF, XSD) spec. IF stands for “Interchange Format” and this spec describes how to package an entire SML model (including instance documents, schemas and schematron constraints) in one XML document. This is where the real SML interoperability is going to come from. Just as important is the fact that we also published a list of interop scenarios with the associated SML-IF models. What you get is a list of SML-IF documents, each one containing an SML model that exercises some feature of SML. And the interop scenarios document tells you what the result of the validation of this document should be. So you can use your SML-IF code to import this document and then your SML code to validate it. By then comparing the results of this validation with what is expected, you can find potential interop problems in your code.
There is going to be an interop session on January 16/17 where implementers will come together to compare their results with these scenarios (HP will be there). But even if you don’t plan to come to the interop, these interop scenarios provide very useful test cases for your code. It’s true that by its nature SML lends itself well to such unit testing, but really there is little excuse for other specs to not also come out with such tests. And I speak as someone guilty of having pushed some of these other specs out.
If you are interested in coming to the interop event, here is the invitation. All the details (including the legal agreement) are at http://serviceml.org.
Comments Off on SML news
Filed under Everything, Standards
Working backwards
Werner Vogels describes Amazon’s approach to product definition as working backwards, starting with, in order, the press release, the FAQ, a definition of the customer experience and the user manual(s). A few comments:
- When I was an R&D manager we didn’t go as far as starting from the press release. Well, to be honest none of the projects I managed was big enough to get its own press release anyway (things are different now that some of my work is on multi-company standards efforts where press releases are cheap). But we did write the user manual first in some cases. I can testify that in addition to providing a lot of clarity for the development team it also results in much better user manuals. Because they are written based on what the thing does, rather than based on how the thing is implemented as is often the case with after-the-fact user manual.
- When you do the way Werner Vogels describes, the FAQ is more a list of “expected questions” than a real list of “frequently asked questions” but that still beats 80% of FAQs out there that are lists of “questions we’d like you to ask”.
- This kind of reminds me of the French approach to dating. Starting from the end and working your way back to small talk.
Filed under Everything, Off-topic