Monday, January 31, 2005

Yahoo! News - The Open-Source Challenge

Yahoo! News - The Open-Source Challenge

Right or wrong, Open-Source is rapidly changing the landscape. I think the term re-inventing themselves is going to come into play a lot over the next few years as the traditional software vendors try and figure this out.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

ISS X-Force Database:sdk-jre-applet-restriction-bypass(18188): Sun SDK and JRE applet bypass sandbox restrictions

ISS X-Force Database:sdk-jre-applet-restriction-bypass(18188): Sun SDK and JRE applet bypass sandbox restrictions

For you webMethods folks, this shouldn't affect your servers...but your developer's desktops might have this problem if they are using the Sun JDK. Take note in the advice that it is not enough to just stop using it, it must be completely removed from the system.

Friday, January 28, 2005

New Web Services Standards

W3C and OASIS have put out some new recommendations on standards for Web Services. I don't know about you but I'm still trying to get my hands around the existing standards. One of the biggest challenges we have seen is interoperability between vendors. We are using a variety of vendors including Microsoft(.Net), webMethods, webSphere, custom C clients, custom Java clients plus others. All of which seem to have varying levels of support for Web Services.

One of the bright spots is the ease of which webMethods and .Net interoperate. Of course this is assuming you get over the hump of how webMethods works with doc/literal. Many thanks to Mark Carlson for that bit of knowledge.

I haven't found the interoperability between webSphere and anything to be as straight forward. I believe that is mainly due to the way the WSAD IDE does things for you behind the scenes. I admit I'm not an expert with the WSAD but I do fine that it generates code behind the scenes that uses IBM specific classes or implementations that does not always play well with others.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Java and Web Services

I am looking at different IDE's that have web services support(for Java development). I haven't been thrilled at the toolsets so far. It seems Microsoft has a better knack for the development environment. The Java tools are either really big and bulky ie WebSphere (WSAD ) or really light on features. .Net makes consuming and producing Web Services pretty trivial. I kind of like Sun's new Java Studio Creator. It takes a similar approach in terms of layout that Microsoft does. Web Services creation and consumption are almost identical to Microsoft's .Net environment. I wonder it there was any collaboration there.

I'm still trying to get use to Eclipse. I'm not a huge fan but that is the way of the future. webMethods is porting its development environment to Eclipse sometime in the fall. So I have little choice.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Techworld.com - Enterprise benefits of the Linux 2.6 kernel

Techworld.com - Enterprise benefits of the Linux 2.6 kernel

I thought this was an interesting article on some kernel differences between the major vendors. It is a little old but still applies. Does this contribute to vendor lock-in? Just how difficult would it be to move off of Redhat Enterprise and go to SuSe enterprise? I am talking about large scale enterprise applications.