Steve Jones

One of the objections I've had about REST for a while is that it appears to ignore Deutch's fallacies of network computing The network is reliable. Latency is zero.Bandwidth is infinite.The network is secure.Topology doesn't change.There is one administrator.Transport cost is zero.The network is homogeneous.Now REST specifies 8, assumes 1, 2 and 3 and takes 4 to mean HTTP/S with Basic

I get to do presentations quite a lot and help people with how they message around SOA and selling to the business. One of the core parts of this is how important presentation skills are and how sometimes you have to face it that you might have the content but you don't have the presentation skills. The problem is that when you don't recognise this you can find yourself hijacked by someone with

Being over at JavaOne there were three things that shouted over the base signal Web 2.0 - participation, Java + You, social networksSaaS and Cloud ComputingScripting languagesAll the time I heard comments about numbers of users, community, eyeballs, sell the advertisements, "it doesn't matter if enterprises don't do it, it will happen anyway". And it made me think back to 2000 and my first

Around JavaOne there was a lot of buzz around Java becoming a bit bloated. Now I've argued for a long time (including in the dreadful JavaSE 6 group) that Java should have a basic core and then architects should be able to decide on the extensions they want for their project. So the issue with Java isn't the bloat, its the process by which the JCP and (from experience) the Sun JavaSE team want

I've always believed that consistency matters, whether it be at the architecture or the technology level. Its just much easier to manage a team with differing abilities if there is a consistent model and implementation. I'm fortunate however in that I've picked technologies that actually work. Pity two fools that I heard on the floor of JavaOne (Moscone South if I remember correctly) they were

Well that was a dramatic finish to JavaOne. Myself and Duane were due to do a repeat presentation today at JavaOne on SOA Level Setting around the OASIS SOA Reference Model. Duane emailed me earlier in the day to say that he had been very sick over night and had just been to see the Docs. I told him I'd fly solo but the Canadian Billy Idol vowed to carry on as only a man ignoring the bloody

At JavaOne you always seen some crap presentations and you see some great presentations on things that you will never actually use in the real world. Then occasionally you wander into a presentation where people have done something in Java that is truly mental but actually has a point. Welcome to JPC, the Java PC emulator. Yup you can run an x86 PC on top of a JVM, including running Linux.

Some technologies are aimed at developers, some are aimed at fanboy developers, sometimes however technologies are aimed at the bigger picture, how to architect, deliver and operate enterprise systems. SCA and JBI are two such technologies and there seems to be a misunderstanding around them being competing technologies. I've said before that SCA and JBI should work together so this isn't news

Ever heard of 2nd project syndrome? Its the concept that engineers when they have delivered a successful first project they will then tend to over engineer the next solution putting in all the bits that they wished they had done on the first project. YAGNI is my favourite "agile" principle. Now personally I didn't realise it was agile until I was told, I'd been happily asking "why do we need

One of the best things about working in a Virtual Machine environment for work is that you can take a full backup of the machine and if there are issues roll back to it. This has worked really well when I've been installing software that tended to trash Windows, but I came across a big problem today as I tried to resolve my space problem. I decided to revert to a saved VM from 12 months ago and

One of the core concepts in SOA is the idea that a service should have a Service Level that it agrees to meet (the SLA), this might be technical in terms of up times, response times, amount of information to be handled. In more sophisticated services it could be more business oriented in terms of cost to serve, order to ship time, conversion rate, stock levels etc. These agreements can apply

Reading an article at El Reg on Oracle's licensing model for Sun and thinking about my comments on SOA pricing models there appears to be a fundamental disconnect between the direction that IT is taking and the pricing to get there. When you move into the virtualisation world the problem becomes even greater. Lets say that I have a blade server with 1000 x 2 core CPUs and on that I virtualise

Over on the Yahoo SOA list there has been a discussion on how you know if a solution is service oriented. Now beyond the superb OASIS SOA Reference Model I'd say there is a very simple test. Do you have the SOA "picture"Can you map the picture to the implementation?Can you map the picture to how its operated?Can you map the picture to how you are organised?What I mean by the picture is something

I'm sure we've all either suffered from or taken advantage of the old "track changes" or history aspects of Microsoft Word, you know the bit where you are able to read what the writer actually wrote first time, like a price of £100,000 before they found out the budget was £200,000. I've seen some bad things in my time on this with people shipping confidential information to a company

At Uni I learnt Ada, in my first job I did Eiffel (and C) and in my second I did Ada (and C) as a result of which a bunch of people sent me a link to this article on how Ada delivered the sort of success that C programmers can only dream about. Udi Dahan then had a post over on InfoQ about how a "traditional" approach failed and required a much more engineering solution and some smart contracts.

Over the past bunch of years I've seen a consistent thing about SOA "change" programmes, namely that they actually look at only two things. The green bits on the slide, the technology and the IT architecture. Sometimes the architecture change is only aspirational and its a focus on the technology alone. The point is that the real change is in the purple and blue bits. This is where change

Reading a few email lists recently I've noticed a worrying trend around SOA that can be compared the the "struct" problem of OO. People are trying to look at information independently from its business context. Often this is the single canonical form mentality but its part of a broader problem where people (often called information architects) push forwards an idea that the information is the

This is a simple idea to stop people missing their stop on a train or bus station by using a proximity detection from the phone or other mobile device of a person. Once the device is within 10 miles (configurable) of the destination it will emit a loud noise or vibrate in order to inform its owner that they should be awake and ready. Yes I missed my stop on the train today. Technorati Tags:

Now I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and a thought just occurred to me. There are two groups of Architects who have disdain for technology Those that can't cut it in development and have escaped into Powerpoint Those who have gone through technology delivery and out the other sideLet me explain. I've worked with some very smart technology people down the years and in my job have the pleasure

I've said it before and I'll say it again... SOAP v REST is more pointless than vi v emacs. Building on the previous post and in reference to an article at InfoQ I'm really beginning to feel that IT, and most especially the software part, has some form of terrorist organisation going whose job it is to ensure that the business always looks on IT folks with disdain. The number of times I've seen