The Wiki Way

After all these years, Ward's wiki is still the simplest, and because of that, the best.

Nicely done.

We Did It For The Children

A grand justification for the greed that's bringing down the mortgage industry and wreaking havoc on credit generally...

As you might expect, they are now self-righteously blaming those, such as Countrywide, who did what they were told.

Golly, we were just trying to help the kids. Think of the children.

Uh-huh. That criticism is just a leee-tle bit "off balance".

Where your time goes when you're not on the web

We have a simple REST web service running on a dev server. The url is typical, e.g. http://domain/thingies/thingy5. Use it anywhere you like. We don't care. And it's really easy.

The other day I came across another team's wiki page with one of our urls in it. The page had some text discussing some code for working with the information about these thingies. This url showing up should be no surprise -- it's just the web.

But at the same time this week we're working on some other REST web services. The underlying implementation of these has to work across multiple legacy systems, several of which are accessed via their own proprietary SOAP services.

Looking at the WSDL for one, I see it's an end point definition for an interface defined in another WSDL somewhere else. But getting to that other WSDL is a royal pain -- if this is a *web* service, why can't I just *click* on something to get it?

Instead I copy and paste the pieces of text I think will form a url to the desired WSDL. Nope. Is it just gone, or did I copy and paste incorrectly?

Meanwhile next to me and in Belfast other team members are running into familiar problems with several SOAP toolkits generating code against these WSDLs. Then SoapUI makes the connection, and a co-worker cuts and pastes this into his application code instead of using one of the high and mighty SOAP toolkits. It works!

Another co-worker then suggests that maybe our app should just screen-scrape SoapUI! Brilliant! 8^)

This is the nth time in my career I've used SOAP, only to find each one a time sink more than an order of magnitude less productive than simply using HTTP. But go ahead and argue best as you can why that's a good idea.

I'll just respond, "Please don't hurt the web." Or my productivity.

Agile Open Northwest 2008 - a few spots still open

We're down to about a half dozen available spots for people interested in attending Agile Open Northwest 2008 in Seattle. Like last year, we'll have between 110-120 people.

If you are going and you want to figure out a ride share, room share, etc. see the following wiki page... http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AgileOpenNorthwest

More Cloud Data Services

The competition for cloud services is picking up with Microsoft's SQL Server Data Services. I guess that name is a nice ad for their database product, but from glancing at the page for the service, has no bearing on the service itself.

i.e. nothing about SQL Server that I've seen so far appears in the service interface. It's an HTTP-based service.

See? I like writing positive things about Microsoft.