Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

#insert nun_joke.h

Where's the SOAP ?


I think I've said this before. But that piece still reads like regurgitated M$oft market-o-bollocks.

SOA is wonderful. Yes, absolutely. But that's what a lot of people are selling _except_ M$oft, so M$oft are trying to push something else instead. You can tell me it's Marmite, but I know what bullshit tastes like.

XML is not the answer. It's just a tiny, tiny piece of it all. Read Tim B-L from about 4 years ago - there are now even parts of M$oft who have realised how significant this stuff is, but evidently not this bunch.

And the Grid _really_ won't look like this. Ever.

Take a look at Stanford uni and their Protege tool. Even better, go to the annual workshop and see what people are already building with it. I went to last year's (conveniently in Manchester) and really had my socks blown off.

"Visio can save out process flows in a form that can be used by Microsoft BizTalk 2004,"
Bollocks. Visio can't generate anything with better semantics than a pencil on a fag-packet (just try it). If BizTalk has chosen to read this stuff, it's because it's inferencing like crazy and it has picked the brains of whoever coded the Visio stencils. It does not mean that Visio has become any sort of communicable design tool for general use.

I built a CMS page design tool with Visio a few weeks ago - vile process, barely any smarter than doing it with Notepad. The "schema" goes to the level of "box" and "line". It doesn't even give you a remotely useful way of dealing with the line connectors (one of Visio's better features), unless you know the innards of each shape's specific implementation.

And when I see an article about web services that are trying to address any sort of business-process level, and there are links at the top to XML Schema and XSLT, then I weep.