Blogarithms
Doug Kaye's thoughts on web services, web hosting and managed services.
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Mark Gives Up. Mark Baker has thrown up his hands in frustration over the work of WS-Arch. "The sun will set on Web services, as it has on every other attempt to deploy object-specific interfaces on the Internet." Object-specific, Mark?
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003 6:37:12 PM 
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Jim Gray on Storage. Thanks to Phil Windley and Tim Bray for linking to this great interview with storage guru, Jim Gray. Read the others' highlights, or better yet--read the whole interview. My favorites include:
- Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home. That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.
- The processors are going to migrate to where the transducers are. Thus, every display will be intelligent; every NIC will be intelligent; and, of course, every disk will be intelligent...Soon they will have an IP interface and will be running Web servers and databases and file systems. Gradually, all the processors will migrate to the transducers: displays, network interfaces, cameras, disks, and other devices. This will happen over the next decade. It is a radically different architecture...It's IP. The interface is probably Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or some derivative of SOAP; you send requests to it and get back responses in a pretty high-level protocol. The IP sack does security and naming and discovery.
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003 5:02:37 PM
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Web Services--A Manager's Guide. Last month I suggested that someone do a comparative review of this new book by Anne Thomas Manes and my latest book. Last week, I had the opportunity to meet Anne and get a copy of her book. Rather than wait, here are my own--admittedly biased--comparisons.
"A Manager's Guide," as the title suggests, is the perfect pragmatic guide for managing a current web-services project. If you want to know what works today, right down to the specific products from individual vendors, Anne's book is the one to buy. .NET versus Java? Which J2EE platform or UDDI registry server? The current state of the basic protocols: SOAP, WSDL, UDDI? You'll find the answers in one place. As with my book, there are no code fragments or XML listings. It's for managers, not programmers. But this book is the one to buy for your tactical requirements.
"Loosely Coupled," on the other hand, takes a more strategic view, and in a sense picks up where Anne's book leaves off. I don't explain any of the protocols. In fact I rarely mention them by name. I assume (a) you'll learn about them somewhere else (such as from Anne's book), and (b) they'll change quickly anyway. Anne has a 30-page chapter on "Advanced Web-Services Standards," which is where my book kicks in. As the subtitle suggests, I look more deeply at the missing pieces of web services: transactions, security, reliable asynchronous messaging, orchestration and choreography, QoS, contracts and other business issues, infrastructure, and the big one: industry-specific semantics.
Both books cover the fundamental concepts of web services such as service-oriented architectures. Anne, however, sees web services as being fundamentally about application integration, which clearly is the sweet spot today. I look at the issues surrounding inter-organizational loosely coupled web services, taking a longer-term and more strategic view. If you're thrust into managing a web-services project, need to ramp-up quickly, select vendors and products, and be able to communicate with your developers, buy Anne's book. If you need to develop a long-term web-services strategy for your organization, buy mine. In other words: buy them both. I think you'll like the combination.
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003 8:31:16 AM
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Windows Server 2003 Approaching 100,000 Active Sites; 8,000 Switch from Linux Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in December 2002 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 43% (68K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (8K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from other operating systems. [Source: Netcraft.com]
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003 7:45:25 AM
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