WS-Misunderstood

Eric Newcomer writes in the SOA yahoo group...

Web services specifications are misunderstood and not implemented correctly. JAX-RPC is the kind of "poster child" for this.

Steve Burbeck and Multicellular Computing

Jon Udell has an interesting session with Steve Burbeck (who's only apparent career blemish appears to be the design of UDDI 8^).

[Update: Steve explains his role with UDDI in a comment on this post.]

Burbeck's history goes back to that Tektronix Smalltalk community here in Portland that spawned Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Gemstone Smalltalk, Digitalk Smalltalk, etc. The work Cunningham, Burbeck, and others did at Wyatt with a Smalltalk-based trading system is a gold mine of ideas barely tapped, yet more relevant than most enterprisey systems built since.

Someone could write a book on Tek Labs and the direct and indirect influence it had not just in popularizing Smalltalk, but design patterns, agile programming, etc. It's reach is far and wide and largely unrecognized.

Back to Burbeck... the current references are to his work on multi-cellular computing. Apoptosis is an increasingly recorgnized pattern, e.g. from the Erlang community the idea that small components should give up quickly and allow a higher-order component handle the fault.

Stigmergy is interesting... it's not really found in Erlang, except I guess it is in a sense what the Mnesia distributed database is for. It's also a key aspect of the Linda tuple spaces / Javaspaces model, and the idea of "blackboards" in artificial intelligence.

Linux Fest Northwest incl. Tim Bray

Linux Fest Northwest is on April 29 in Bellingham, WA. That's a beautiful part of the state in the north Cascades not too far from Vancouver, BC. Admission is free.

I hope I can make it up there. Tim Bray is scheduled to talk on things non-enterprisey...

"XML, Open Source, Complexity, Simplicity"

There are a number of other interesting presentations scheduled.

WWW2007 in the Canadian Rockies

Mark Baker is helping with WWW2007, which will be held in Banff. I will what I can to be there. The Canadian Rockies is in the Top 5 of my favorite locations in North America and I could use any excuse to go back there.

Oh, I'm sure the conference will be interesting too.