Proud member of the X-List

Some kind of threshold has been reached when something like Blogebrity can be launched and just might not be a joke.  I don't know whether it's a threshold of critical mass or the critical step down a slippery slope.  Maybe both.

I figure I'm somewhere in the middle of the X-List.

And yes, I think the Blogebrity Swimsuit Edition would be a really bad idea.

My Google Debuts

...and who didn't see this coming with the inevitability of an iridium-laced asteroid?  http://google.com/ig. 

Nofollow for Journals

One of the hidden features of our latest update is support for the rel="nofollow"convention for links in comments.  Since Journals automagicallymakes anything in a comment that looks like a link clickable, this willhopefully help discourage link spamfrom getting started.  (Nofollow tells engines such as Google andTechnorati that the link itself wasn't created or endorsed by theauthor of the page and so the link doesn't mean any additional weightshould be given to the link's target.  It's not the best name forthe concept, but why quibble?)

AIM Blogs

I'm ecstatic about our latest release of AOL Journals (just announced)  -- AIM Blogs! This essentially opens up the AOL Journals blogging service to thepublic.  Anyone with a free AIM screen name can now create blogs at journals.aol.com.  Cool!

Stumbled across: Feed Fest

Just stumbled across FeedFest at corante.com:

"Feedfestis a six-month online multimedia series focused on the increasinglydynamic and powerful content syndication applications that are allowingpeople to consume what they want, when they want, where they want andhow they want. Launched last year as “RSS Winterfest”, the re-namedevent will feature interviews with the thought leaders who are shapingnew ways for content to be published and consumed. This year’s programhas expanded to include other syndication formats besides RSS, and willalso explore the growing syndication of audio and video as well."

Looksinteresting, though I am wondering: Why six months?  Do RobertScoble, Steve Gillmor, Bob Wyman, & co. hibernate for the other six?

Atom Authentication

I've written up a replacement for the authentication section of the Atom protocol: http://intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceAuthentication. It's simple but unusable by servers in restricted hosting situationstypical of Movable Type and Blosxom blogs; I hope this serves asprovocation for someone on that side to nail down an alternativeauthentication scheme.  But even if not, at least everyone elsewill have a minimal fallback for authentication.

Note that the proposal also allows servers to require authenticationfor comments -- something that would be a helpful building block infighting comment spam.

SD West: SOA: The Next Big Thing (Keynote)

Dave Chappell delivered an entertaining keynote. Again, this was targeted squarely at enterprise applicationdevelopers.  I felt a bit like a tourist in a foreign country -- happyto be there, interested, but a bit puzzled and probably missing some ofthe shared cultural nuances.  (Despite having created some enterprise development tools, I've never actually worked as an enterprise developer.)

Dave cut the Gordian knot involved in defining service orientedarchitecture ("the debate is both endless and pointless") by statingthat it's defined by the dominant technologies:  A service is what thedominant products say it is -- and WebSphere and .NET are the dominantproducts, so services means SOAP and WS-*.  And I'm not sure, but Ithink he defines 'dominant products' as 'whichever platforms have themost market share among vendors selling tools to enterprisedevelopers'.  Which of course rules out anything that doesn't help sellplatform tools :^).  I glance at the Internet, which is mysteriouslyworking again, and verify that Dave Chappell is an old-school DCOMguy.  He seems very happy that the vendors are finally agreeing on ashared standard for communication; after the CORBA/DCOM/RMI wars, Iimagine so.

He did have some useful points to make about moving to SOA within anorganization, identifying two major approaches:  Top down, in which youidentify business needs, document requirements, design an architecture,and implement the services in a well planned, sensible way.  The prosare that this is elegant, clean, and sensible; the cons are that it's(nearly) impossible.  Requires high investment and long-term businessbuy-in.  He recommended the bottom-up approach (just build one service,then another, then start thinking about central SOA issues such assecurity and management) as a practical if ugly approach.

He presented a toy example using C# code.  Now, his main points wereabout the orthogonality of OO design and service architectures, whichis all well and good.  But I felt that the choice of an example classwith "add(x,y)" and "subtract(x,y)" methods which get turned into webservices sort of obscures the question -- why would we want to dothat?  It's a ridiculous web service.  Why not pick a toy example thatactually makes some tenuous sense as a web service?  For example,a word definition lookup service?

In the short Q&A period, one person asked the obvious question: What about the REST-ish approaches that so many service providers suchas Google, Yahoo!, etc. are using to expose services?  Dave's answerwas somewhat revealing, but as a tourist I'm not sure I can properlyinterpret it.  He said, #1, web services are defined by SOAP and WS-*because that's what the dominant vendors say; and #2, he doesn't "getinto SOAP vs. REST debates because the REST community..." and there hepaused, and looked thoughtful, and then reiterated "I don't get intoSOAP vs. REST debates".  He sure seemed uncomfortable to me.

(Side note:  My spell checker suggests "DOOM" as an appropriatesubstitute for "DCOM".  Sometimes I think it's really acquired AI and it's just toying with me.)