To overcome WS-*

Last week one of my colleagues asked me couple of questions about web services, thinking that I know it better than him but in the middle I puzzled with some of those questions was unable to answer them. I realized it is time for me to bit more organize my web services knowledge. Reading a good technical book is the only possible solution came to my mind. There were couple of eBooks with me but choosing correct one was the main problem. I went with the book with the longest name and with the biggest number of authors I had on this subject. It was "Web Services Platform Architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-Policy, WS-Addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-Reliable Messaging, and More". This book is one of the very good technical books I went through recently and really impressed with it.

It starts with describing the rudimentary difference between of SOA and web services terms. Now I understand how badly people are using terms SOA and web services without knowing real concept. This is how it explains it.

SOA represents one abstraction of architectural concept. It is an approach to building software systems that is based on loosely coupled components (services) that have been described in uniform way that can be discovered and composed.


Web services represents one important approach to realizing on SOA.

Then breaks down web services technology in to nice layered architecture and starts describing each layer both architectural and practical usage point of views. So reader has a clear picture where he is in before diving in to the deep end. The book ends with two case studies to giving more information practical usage of web services technology.

Bill Gates

Though I don't accept his business culture and products, we have to agree Bill Gates is one of most influential people in the modern computer era. He changed the way people look at the computer and creates generation of people like me with his own vision (I think he is one of the first people understand the value of computer software than hardware). For some people he is evil but for me he is yet another complex human being trying to achieve his own goals. But his motivation to what he does is truly amazing. This is a video done by BBC about William Henry Gates gives insight about him. Worth watching but I am not encouraging you to be his customer.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Seven Years in Tibet

One of my friends recommended to read book of "Seven Years in Tibet" in his blog. As I am very lazy to read (specially novels and story books), managed to find the film of the story. It was a nice film with out that much happenings. Then I investigated bit on the book on the wikipedia and found book was based on a true a story and written the main character Henrich by himself. Though my friend told me that book was more interesting than film, I still believe watching film is much easy for me than reading a novel :).

IMDB

Wikipedia

Software for a concurrent world

I always enjoy listening good technical speeches. This is one of those interesting ones.
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/erlang-software-for-a-concurrent-world

First thing noticeable is the guys presentation skills, that is definitely damn good and he backed up his views computer science theory and real world examples. As a software programmer I also think now the time has arrived us to think more seriously about concurrency about our programs. If we can achieve this parallelism via using CPU level then that would be hugely advantageous as the he suggested.

But there is something I don't agree with him here. Will the business programmers will move in to a functional programming language to achieve this task? For me it is going to be huge leap which will require some additional time and money which can not be satisfied easily. If we can achieve this same parallelism while sitting in the same business programming language like Java that would be very nice feature add programmer's armory. I am wondering is there a bridge between Erlang and Java?

LinkedIn fascinated me

I always enjoy looking at architecture of successful big computer projects in the web. This is an article gives the insight of famous LinkedIn project.
http://cookiesareforclosers.com/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture

These are some of the key points fascinated me on this project.

• See how LinkedIn architecture evolve as time goes. This is one of the key factors to be a successful computer project I believe.
  
• LinkedIn works according to the agile software process. So it can be successfully adopted in large scale projects like this too. See what advantages they are getting with their test cases. Most of the time software programmers are very lazy to write test cases and even architects are not pushing for it. I believe when a project grows in it's size, test cases gives more and more advantages than it's early stages.
  
• The communication methodology used in the project is asynchronous communication with JMS. Sure the project implementation would have bit more complex but it is always acceptable considering the performance gain can be acquired this kind of architecture.