Middleware and Services

SOA is not working on the highest level of abstraction or decoupling. Take a look at event-driven systems for better de-coupling of callers and callees based on abstract events. Gregor Hohpe's site is well worth a closer look. All the patterns from the book can be found there as well as the secrets of starbucks coffee business...

The following is just a list of SOA experiences collected at a technical exchange between two corporations. And for the better contrast: a few hints on mashups as community driven service developments.

Markus Block, who has received a Karl-Steinbuch scholarship this year has now completed his thesis. He combined two very promising technologies: peer-to-peer (Jxta) and the Common Services Gateway Initative (OSGI). The goal was to build a dynamic and reliable mechanism which can be used by home appliances to find and install firmware updates. The work included very interesting ideas on using service and device ontologies in this context. You can download the thesis at the given location.

Time to learn about a new buzzword - and discover the enterprise service bus at the same time.

The SOAP vs. REST debates are still ringing in my ears. Is it OK to define requests using XML in the body of http POST messages? Is this in true INTERNET style and what is this style btw? I found a good source of real experience in the WEBDAV archives and it looks to me as if the experiences from WEBDAV point more in the direction of REST...

Many people felt helpless during the events of the second gulf war. Will the convergence of liberating technologies like WI-FI, peer computing and possible huge computing GRIDs have a liberating effect on western democracies as well? Will there be a move toward more direct democracy?

The fourty degrees in Southern France actually made for some good reading. This time with Albert-Laszlo barabasi's book "linked". He investigates the link topologies of the WEB, of our electric system etc. And while I was reading his analysis on the power outages in the 1970's and how they can be explained by the network topology the big power outage in the USA happend. About scale-free networks, topologies and what we can learn from them.

How do you handle the relation between zipcode and city in browser based applications? Worried about data sizes or roundtrip times and usability? Take a look at XmlHttpRequest and Ajax technologies