Loosely Coupled Thinking : e-Gov

"Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats"

jevdemon — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 08:16:00 GMT

MA reverses itself on adopting Microsoft Office Open XML format.

You can get a sneak peek at Office Open XML format here.

Update: Sun's Carl Cargill urges MA to rethink its opinion.

Cargill raises a rather interesting point (according to ComputerWorld) - (emphasis mine):

Cargill said it would be a "mistake" for Massachusetts to support Open XML based on "a single vendor's promise to submit a new product to a standards body at some point in the future." Instead, the state should move forward with its support of OpenDocument as the standard format for state documents, because not only has it already been approved by a standards body, but it also allows any vendor to build upon the standard, something an ISO or Ecma standard wouldn't allow, he wrote.

XML is just text with pointy brackets and is totally extensible. I have yet to see any "schema police" prevent anyone from extending any XML schema.

BTW - I'm not too keen on the name "Open XML" - it appears to have been invented by the Department of Redundancy Department....

IMS Advanced Web Services Profiles

jevdemon — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:40:00 GMT

IMS (Instructional Management Systems, Global Learning Consortium - www.imsglobal.org) is an international standards group developing interoperable technical standards for e-Learning. Membership includes leading technology system suppliers, publishers, user organizations and universities active in e-Learning. I (briefly) attended IMS' recent ALT-I-Lab conference in Sheffield to present the IMS Advanced Web Services Profiles. The profiles are designed to provide prescriptive guidance on how the WS-Addressing, WS-Security and MTOM specifications can be used to transport IMS Content Packages from point to point.

My presentation is here. I had to depart Sheffield early (prior to my presentation actually) so I created a video of the demo to leave at the conference. The video of the demo is here (Windows Media format). Word of warning regarding the video: I didn't have an external mike handy and the mike on my laptop didn't seem to work. To get around this issue I "typed" subtitles much like you might see in an old silent movie (laughable but strangely effective).

Let me know if you would like a copy of the code used in the demo (totally unsupported of course!).

Sheffield was an interesting place and reminded me a lot of my old hometown.

Indigo has arrived

jevdemon — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 23:16:00 GMT

You know you want it. Now go get it.

Thinking about SOA (again)

jevdemon — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 02:29:00 GMT

Eventually we’ll stop talking about SOA and go back to talking about Architecture. When we stop talking about SOA it will finally become a reality (who talks about 3-tier architectures anymore?). Thanks to Harry for this one!
SOAs are like snowflakes – no two will be the same.
SOAs will most likely be built using web services (but building web services will not necessarily result in a SOA).
The most valuable services will be used in ways in which their original architects never intended or expected.
A specification without an implementation is a hypothesis and should be treated as such.
SOA is not new. CORBA, DCE, DCOM and EDI were all early examples.
EDI may have provided the first example of SOA principles (e.g. document-centric, loosely coupled, etc).
SOA is not web services
SOA is a design philosophy, not a technology or a methodology
SOA does not enable or ensure the alignment of IT and business. The IT industry has been promising this for decades –there is no silver bullet for aligning IT and business. Alignment of IT and business is an organizational issue that will not be resolved by an architectural design philosophy alone.
Service Orientation (SO) will happen in your organization in one of two possible ways: chaotically (typical approach) or in a disciplined manner. The path your organization takes (and the cost of later fixing that path) is up to you.
Companies that fail to adopt SOA will be less competitive in the marketplace,
SOA is a means for realizing loosely coupled business processes. Loosely coupled business processes (not services) are the key to an agile organization.
SOA is a means, not an end. Opportunity emerges when a SOA is used.
A service’s value is equivalent to the number of business processes in which it appears.
Services are not Distributed Objects
Business Processes are not Distributed Objects
Distributed Objects and Legacy Systems should be cleaved into services
If you set out to “do SOA” you will fail. All IT projects have the objective of improving the performance of the enterprise – there is no point for the IT project to exist otherwise.