alek blogs

Time is the scarcest resource

Time is the scariest resource and it should be treated as the most important factor when considering any task. From interview with Jim Gray:

(...) You see this today. Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home.

That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.(...)

However it is also important to not simplify the problem we try to solve or we have something very easy-to-use but useless ...

He also talks about phenomenon of scale when doing software development and I find this estimate quite interesting:

David Patterson: What do you think is happening with databases in terms of open source? What is the Linux of databases?

Jim Gray: I think it's exciting. Very small teams built the early database systems. A small team at Oracle built the original Oracle, and there were small teams at Informix, Ingress, Sybase, and IBM.

Twenty-five people can do a pretty full-blown system, and ship it, and support it, and get manuals written, and test it. (...)

Now the trick is to be where action is and to be part of such team :-)

created Sat July 12, 2003 5:43 PM EST [2003/7/12 17:43 EST] permalink

Xydra: easy way to add Web Services to your portal

Xydra is a library that uses servlet to provide XHTML based WSDL invoker. Xydra servlet takes WSDL with XML Schema complex types as input, generates XHTML form to allow user to fill content of input message, gathers submitted input values and converts form name-value pairs into XML message that is sent it to Web Service and then finally displays result message.

One could ask: there are other WSDL invokers so what makes Xydra unique? Here is couple reasons:

• Xydra has pluggable data model and currently two backend to represent form and XML message content One is traditional name-value pairs that are structured into tree (called TreePath) and second that is based on Protege engine to use ontology describing web service to allow more reach constraints and relationship validation (called OntoBrew).
• It is very easy to customize Xydra look and feel: just save auto-generated XHTML page, modify it to your needs and tell Xydra to use this XHTML page as template. What makes it really easy is that template is a regular XHTML page that is used by Xydra processing engine (unsurprisingly called Diesel) to annotate it with runtime information.
• Xydra support complex types and generate nice XHTML form UI for arbitrarily nested XHTML forms.
• You get source code so you can improve it :-)

Sample installation is available online to test drive Xydra. It is open source so anybody can play with it, improve it, and give us feedback, patches are gladly accepted, we may even fix some bugs when reported (good bug report that contains all information necessary to reproduce problem and/or unit test greatly increases chances of getting problem fixed ...)

created Sun July 27, 2003 11:55 PM EST [2003/7/27 23:55 EST] permalink

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