James Fenner

Faster than you can say XML, a whole cottage industry has developed to standardize the mechanics of Web services to add to them protocols for things like security and routing and workflow, and even to develop standard XML schemas for business. For too many, though, Web services are synonymous with service-oriented architecture; many believe that you can't have the latter without the former. While it is cool - this ability for my Visual Basic application to call a Java EJB - it is still just a tactical, marginal improvement in our ability to deliver systems. The real strategy - the big deal that is service orientation - is the systematic eradication of duplication in our systems. For many, this duplication of code and effort is reaching pandemic proportions. Building enterprise systems is such a daunting task that we usually don't do it. Smaller, departmental solut... (more)

A Perfect Fit

The first house I ever bought was built in 1936. It had style, it had character, and it had really narrow hallways and tight corners. The sofa we had bought - the one that went perfectly with all the style and character - wouldn't fit in the house. Apparently folks in 1936 had smaller furniture. Eventually I learned out how to take apart a window and was able to get the sofa into the house, but in the process, Pandora snuck out. Behind the window frame was rot. I looked into some of the other windows and found rot and bugs. My initial reaction was that I'll just need to replace ... (more)