Web Things, by Mark Baker

Good advice from Julian; “Use REST not XMLRPC. Use XMLRPC not SOAP. Use SOAP not the whole WS* stack”
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“I recommend erasing such memories before trying HTTP.” — Roy Fielding 8-)
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Adam reports on the availability of a presentation of his, given at a Salesforce.com conference. The gist of the talk is that – excuse me for likely oversimplifying – waterfall model, bad, quick iterations driven by customer demand, good. Sort of a “worse is better” pitch (as much as I hate that phrase).

What I enjoyed the most though, was this bit from the beginning of his talk;

It’s very very easy in this industry to believe your own bullshit – to invent some huge, very fancy model for how things will work, and then go running like a bunch of crazed hampsters on wheels with that assumption in mind, where unfortunately it turns out that you’re actually floating across open water and about to drown.

Heh. 8-)

“it has crucial dependencies on […] WS-Transfer” Wha?! I thought WS-Transfer was a joke! Seriously. Maybe he meant WS-Transport? You know how WS folks confuse transfer and transport. 8-)
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“Congratulations for making it all the way into the mid 80’s, technology wise.” Heh. Seems a common theme in the industry today. 8-(
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While absorbing Richard MacManus’ latest, and in turn something from Phil Wainewright, last week, I happened upon a phrase (by Mohan Sawney) that struck a strong historical chord with me, taking me back to my days as a “business object” weenie;

Five years from now, the concept of an application will be obsolete […] They will all be services, combined, mixed, matched and reused as needed.

As you can see from the two papers I authored at each of the OOPSLA ’96 and OOPSLA ’97 Business Object Workshops, in particular the latter one, I had similar thoughts;

Distributed objects, specifically business objects, are not about building a better application. They are about replacing the application as the predominant means of delivering value to customers.

The first paper also gets at this, though indirectly through workflow-coloured glasses;

Work items and lists are outdated. In the world of business objects, the desktop is the interface. As Oliver Sims preaches, OO document centric GUIs are how business objects will present themselves to their users. And they won’t be shy. They won’t disguise themselves because there is no need to. Users will recognize them as entities in their business domain, and they’ll understand (in most cases, intuitively) what it means to do typical OO GUI operations on them. Icons representing the business objects themselves will clutter the screen. Nebulous ‘work item’ concepts don’t fit customer relationships management. They aren’t objects. Work is a consequence of what happens when business objects play together on desktop GUIs as directed by users.

Boy, that’s some awkward writing though. Ouch. That first one, from ’96, was the first paper I ever submitted anywhere. I remember that I wrote it in a couple of hours, right after a discussion with my friend Chester Kwok where he helped me finally “get” objects. It’s funny, looking back, to see how close I was to understanding the Web at that point, and how “getting OO” was so closely related to the “getting” of REST. Why didn’t I associate “typical OO GUI” operations with GET (double-click/open), PUT (save), POST (the ‘drop’ of ‘drag-and-drop’), DELETE (drop-to-garbage-can) then? Grrr… Compare and contrast this too;

Therefore, not only are business objects built from a framework, they can (and should, if they’re competing to be reused) also be frameworks.

Hmm, looks like ad-hoc, distributed composition’s doing just fine without “Web services”
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Oh my!
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Gee, tell me something I don’t know!

Sorry, Paul, I too get the “a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness” descriptor.

You are a Social Liberal (83% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (65% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Freudian slip of the week; “lously coupled” 8-)
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