I.T.A.A. - Screwing us Again

I try real hard not to post non-service-oriented topics on this blog, but I have to make an exception.

Once again, the group that has positioned itself as the champion of the I.T. professional is hell-bent on screwing the American software engineers. ITAA, has recently been lobbying to make sure that more American labor goes offshore:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,928611,00.asp

If you aren't familiar with this group - keep your eyes open - they find ways at every turn to screw the American I.T. professional. It is really sad.

Choreography a Mess?

Phil Wainewright over at Loosely Coupled is of the opinion that the choreography space is a mess:
http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/2003_03_16_lc.htm#200027961

I'll have to disagree with Phil on this subject. BPEL4WS won. I'll repeat that, BPEL4WS won - there is no confusion about winners - just confusion about who lost.

I am of the opinion that perhaps the w3c should quit trying to be everything to everyone. This group is over-extended and frankly shouldn't be concerning themselves about business process execution (IMHO). Don't get me wrong, I think they do a great job with low-level technologies like XML and HTML - but this one is probably not in their sweet spot. I really don't understand why they kick started this group after IBM & MS made their announcement and we already had BPML doing world-class work on moving the space forward as a whole.

For the first time ever, the space actually isn't a mess... you just have to dig through the losers.

UDDI Entity Relationship Diagram

Dave Carlson, CTO of Otogenics Corp. did a nice white paper.

The following image is extracted from that paper. Hopefully, you can use them to avoid getting lost in the UDDI data structures like I did...
How do I get the DAMN AccessPoint?? (my thoughts)





This one is a bit easier to read - basically you can see the inquiry paths. The first is the 'browse' path:
find_business ( name_qualifiers ) :: returns a business_key
find_service ( business_key ) :: returns a service_key
find_binding ( service_key )
find_tModel ( name_qualifiers | identifiers | categories )

The Drill Down Pattern allows you to inquire based on a known key. It uses the get_* pattern do send the key as a parameter.
(get_businessDetail --> get_serviceDetail --> get_bindingDetail --> AccessPoint) .... returns...
(businessEntity --> businessService --> bindingTemplate --> tModel)

Best Practices in UDDI

I've been trying to re-organize my UDDI structure, so I went out looking for best practices. Here is what I found:

As published by OASIS:
http://www.uddi.org/pubs/wsdlbestpractices-V1.07-Open-20020521.pdf

Anne Thomas Manes points out some potential issues:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/uddi-spec/200209/msg00027.html

WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Addressing Released

Microsoft & IBM have released the much anticipated specification for performing reliable messaging:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/default.aspx

I'm reading the specs now - will blog on details later.

Trusted Value Chains

John McDowall, CTO of Grand Central Communications does a great job of explaining some of the issues around business-to-business commerce using web services:

http://www.webservices.org/index.php/article/articleview/953/1/24/

Deloitte & Touche Clears Up Web Services!!!

Deloitte & Touche, a well respected Big 5 consulting company paves new ground in clarifying what web services are:



WOW - why didn't I think of that??? :-)

WS-CallBack

BEA introduces YAS (Yet Another Spec). Usually I dog on specs that WS-Cronies introduce, but I kind of like this one...
http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/webservices/WS-CallBack-0_9.jsp

This specification describes the WS-CallBack protocol. WS-CallBack is used to dynamically specify where to send asynchronous responses to a SOAP request.

The CallBack header is needed in cases where a web service is using asynchronous communication and the address to which to send responses is not known at deployment time. In order to enable asynchronous responses to requests the requestor must specify in the request where to send the responses. The WS-CallBack protocol provides the SOAP and WSDL 1.1 mechanisms needed to enable this behavior.