Sam says this XML stuff is OK.

After some of my reading up, talking and being ReST -active. I'ld have to come to the same conclusion for HTTP is OK.

There was a person running up to me after the talk saying it was irrational of me to say that he shouldn't do SOAP while the ReST :-) of the world was. So I took five more minutes to maybe make clear that the problem is not in SOAP (please use it, and not only for washing). The odd thing however is that in fact people use it to wash the network away.

As the RemoteException in RMI has learned us a long time ago already 'the network is not transparent.' So while modern SOAP frameworks will just make it work: Just dump your classic service implementation, we'll generate the WSDL for it, and on the other side create your client proxy as well.... the real lesson from the Web success (and its services) is that we should not just soap-enable the old design, but in stead design differently for our networked applications. Maybe that is what the ReSTy men out there are trying to say? Sigh. Leaky abstractions again.

Martin Fowler even takes it one step further:

Fowler's First Rule of Distributed Object Design: don't distribute your objects!

As mentioned earlier: Too bad you'll have to buy the book.

As for me, I think the network is OK :-)

Part 2934803748.

Sorry Rik: This shows you did not get this. See, you stated that 'obviously all of these [OSS advocating] people are very smart'. And I would have to agree :-) But my point was exactly that this smartness is not about IQ. Not about intrinsic processing capabilities. Very much about willing-ness and doing-ness. That there is no IQ treshold to get into sharing your thoughts (damn, our blogs is like living prove :-)). That I indeed also do not care about the smartest person if he is just closed up in his room. I hope the sales guy's work will add up to big dividends...Let us blame it on my bad English, but I just tried to redefine smart from 'having highest IQ score' to 'having most interconnnected shared thoughts and biggest falback community for cleaning out code, ideas, architectures'

And I am totally with you here: OSS is for the happy few. Believe me, I was running around at the conference in Amsterdam and felt like an ALIEN! There is indeed so damn few people that know about this tribe of people sharing knowledge (more then code). And believe me, we are happy!

So explain me: what is keeping the wining unhappy masses from joining in? Their own believe (prejudice) that it will be too dificult? The fact that they don't want to? What is so frightening about it? What is so comforting about the 'at least we paid for not knowing the details'? Why the fear? Who dumped them in the spiral of lack of knowledge leading to uncertainty leading to hiding from more knowledge leading to... Who made them doubth they can be 'smart' too?

So, yes. Answering the question with 'the masses say|believe so' is bound to be labeled as FUD. In the mean time, OSS is just there, ready to be used, ready to be discovered by the next: 'Hey, I missed out on the mysterious dificulty-treshold'.On the side: this makes me think about what I read here by the way - the great quote was this:

And most of the development managers agreed. They found that when their companies deployed a large, enterprise system based on J2EE, the implementation was almost always done by the vendor or by a consulting firm selected by the vendor rather than employees of the company. They also cited this phenomenon as the reason that their companies wouldnt pay for training on the J2EE platform; they were in a Catch-22 with regard to trained J2EE resources. If they paid to have them trained, the employees would leave to work for consulting firms where they made more money. If they didnt have trained employees, they would have to pay consulting firms to install and maintain their J2EE-based systems.

Actually I can't believe it is the same guy that told me about the cluetrain, who is now playing the hard to get (through). Dunnow if I ever told you the story of back in Alcatel time: [We were doing this advanced research project that involved a brand new, not yet broadly available Cisco router. It took me 3 weeks to get through 1st (didn't knew they had the router), 2nd (never heard about ATM at that moment), 3rd line (first level that could look into the code!) support to receive the patch I asked for. It didn't work though. While still testing I suddenly noticed that the 'show version' command on this patch carried this detail of "patch xxx build by [username]" ... Guess what: in less then 12 hours some [username]@cisco.com without the extra barriers was happy I helped to nail his bug. Although he mentioned that sending that mail straight through was somewhat "uncommon".]

But there is quite an amount of true horror in these stories... Who at cisco was now entitled to the $100 bonus for finding a bug? The danger of each organisation is that it well end up finding its only reason of being in its existence :-)

And there was no open source in the cisco example, there were only barriers. Like the escrow thing: the barrier there is your company would need to 'cease to exist' (which I would regret a lot) for me to get unlimited access to the code (even if it was for helping you out. You know I did, and "there is" a fair amount of closed source debugging for the CSS industry which is double paid for by means of support contracts.)

The only barrier to open source is in choosing to hide behind it. (The 'it' being 'that barrier'). Don't bother to hide: you will get hit anyway.

It is not about how much knowledge my brain can hold. It is about how many of the knowledge out there is not kept away from me in some bad tasting attempt to preserve the own commercial position. It is not making you do a better job, nor is it helping me. You know, it all is cluetrain. Conversations, man!

On the long winding road home from Amsterdam yesterday, I heared this story on the radio. I heared it, and went on the quest for a personal opinion. Result: NONE. Since it has been a scientific social project to share the news and see how media has trained us all to have an opinion about everything.

"Exercising the right not to walk" -- Charles in the movie "Dead Poets Society"(fun to read all the quotations again, and see the movie in front of me again)

Martin Fowler's new book "Patterns of Enterprise ApplicationArchitecture" was brought to my attention at the conference as well. Thegood news seems to be that we're now in good company for having doubthsand second thoughts on the EJB thing. The bad news seems to be that hison-line patterns catalog is now shortened down to a teaser refering tothe book-pages :-(

Seems like people are reaching the heart of the matter while I was showing off at a congress. Not surprisingly my shared neurons got to note down most of my sentiments on the matter...

Making room for my typical difference in style I'ld like to answer the remaining question: "How to discriminate between smart and 'average' ?" (That average word really stinks btw)

See, at this conference there were 30% less attendants then last year... And looking into the list the conclusion was that the large consulting firms and integrators were the ones absent. Contrarily to Werners believe this obviously show "they already know everything" :-) Their customers that did show up (and are outsmarting them fast) told me that they are getting free consultants nowadays: 2 for the price of 1 since it costs more to need to invent some sensible research topic for the other one they couldn't sell.

Just maybe: Being smart == daring to share and see your opinions challenged. (I would NOT take being able to install / run / extend oss project xyz as the true smartness-qualifier).  Remember perception is reality? The smart guy closed up in his room, is not bound to make a difference in anyones perception. See, OSS is just about showing off :-)

Another day at a conference... Yesterday I heard Ron Tolido tell the story about this Mystery Winchester House of the Spirits in California. Apparently some Sarah, widow of Mr. Winchester (the one who made the improvements to the guns and made enormous wealth out of it), got haunted by the spirits of all the people killed by any winchester rifle. The only way for her not to be driven to madness (maybe a bit too late though) by these ghosts was to keep on extending the house with different rooms, side ways, traps and mysterious corridors to confuse them.(By the way, much of this reminded me of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende).

The great move Ron made in his speach was to draw the parallel with software architecture and how it tends to be mysteriously extended as a defense mechanism from software engineers: saving them from madness inflicted by the ever haunting spirits of unsatisfied customers and end-users :-)

By some coincidence my talk at the conference went further onto the building parallel. I think my explanation of the ReST architecture style actually did get through and opened some eyes.

Interestingly Ron's point was that the times of top-down design and architectural complete building plans are over (and not to be returning) With the advent of grid computing, ever more bandwith and evolutions of the smart-dust kind he foresees the advent of biological-like computing systems where the overview and control factor will reach zero. Welcome Matrix :-)

*update* Another one of Ron's references: Play the game of simple things building up complex systems. (He had some biological examples as well: ant and bee colonies.)

Mr. Gödel on a roll!

This is great imagination applied. Makes me show a wide smile. Great outerthought :-)

Well, this blog-thread is taking directions, I must say. Great to see that Rik was corrected on the implied oss-fud.

Which makes my job as easy as straighting out his moral theory.  Just some of his quotes:

• ...judging about "the right thing to do".
• There are quite a few VERY good arguments FOR a war...
• I certainly do not share the "no war" dogma - ...
• ...there IS such a thing as justified war ...

• so let us all keep on trying, but refrain from judging "the right thing to do"
• there might be arguments, but none of them will accumulate to logical prove and hence justification.
• dogma is bad, utterly naieve (?) I would go for the "no war" axiom.
• Nope. There might be (correction, there WILL be) in the most correct logical tradition more then one paradox based on any ethical rule-system you start off from. In each of these stalemate positions any next step is subject to your utter arbitrary choice.

The choice might be arbitrary in terms of "neither option not logically to be proven as correct". However it is my personal believe that exactly those conditions offer humankind the chance to show off some of their proclaimed (intelligence and moral) supperiority. I see today a huge missed chance.

These thoughts are not making you happy? The conclusion to just chear up after reading is another one of these arbitrary things to do. I know I can. Just to help: use your imagination.

*update* Picking up the dual subject: "While at it, you might as well make the OSS choice :-)"

*update* More hyperlinks wrap-up the original post. Special attention should go to mindsharing buddy.

Working on getting some previous Apache SOAP example to work again on Apache Axis. I almost forgot I did a fair bit of XML massaging with Apache Cocoon in there... So while refactoring my sitemap I got overwhelmed by the publishing need, and got to do my first CocoDocoWikies:

• CleanerSiteMapsThroughResources
• ResourceNaming

Hope you can approve. If not my writing then at least the great wonders of Apache Cocoon. (All that stuff actually works)

Nothing more to say...

The role of the media? To spread information, maybe?

But who really needs them anyway, when you have the WEB?

• Blogs of war
• Blogging from Baghdad and Brussels
• Weasel-Blogging
• Just trying to keep your keyboard clean.

One of the strange sociological effects of the Gödel Theorem is that even Ethical - Law - Religious systems are subject to it, and that by consequence: THERE IS NO TRUTH. So expecting any of it from Media, Politicians, our fellow world citizens is a waste of your own patience and pretty much like asking for empowerment.

There seems to be one basic ethical law to be found in just about any culture: "do not do to others what you hate to be done unto you"...However there is less consensus on how to react when it is done upon you nevertheless, nor to judge (and sentence) those that overrule the basic principle. Worst of all, inversing the basic principle we end up all to easy at: "an eye for an eye".

Suppose every country on earth had a constitution like the Germans stating you cannot be involved in any Attack-war... My guess is the World will be at peace. Untill propaganda redefines defence.

This human race... will probably not be helped by me lighting a candle. However. Can it still be my choice to make it (my) truth?

Preparing ourselves to ship version 2.0

Try this:

$ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.apache.org:/home/cvspublic checkout xml-axis

$ cd java

$ ant all

and then look for this:

all:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 17 minutes 17 seconds

17 beautiful minutes, (and only because I didn't bother the https stuff yet.)I saw a lot of :

[junit] Running test....

All of which gives me a quite comforting out of the box experience... running to the samples now...

Do this at home: In real practice I used the RC2 src distribution and not the bleading edge cvs head AND you'll have some additional jar downloads before actually building, but docos are quite complete...

*update*: build of cvs head works as well, just grab the newer httpclient from jakarta-commons

Another Java experience, for more of us to enjoy? Am afraid that messages like this are only heard as: "it is difficult to date" (so untrue). And there still is this little villain in me that hopes for a growing collective consciousness around the fact that difficult things exist, and will always. Let us not be afraid to think, not even the outerthought.Will play around with it if I have the chance though.

Since wiki assumes (is that a permalink?) there is more then just a pretty face, you might try to substract the looks (hidden behind the calendar) from the content and find out just how much more.

To get your calibration right: I was holding the digicam and Steven spent half a day on photoshop afterwork. :-)

The path to InfoPath trails over Sam and Mark.

This is not XForms, but based on all other XML standards according to the techy FAQ. Anyone knows about an (open source?) XForms implementation that shares any of the drule-effect?

Remembering the Microsoft-release-3-syndrome (stating that all their products pre release 3 simply don't work) the alternatives might still have some time to get their act together.

[warning: some irony ahead] Thx to Tom.You might find this generally funny but the hilarious part is when they get serious:

On a more serious note, Republican Jim Saxton of New Jersey has proposed [...] restrictions on French participation in any postwar construction projects in Iraq.

If you will not let us break it, then we will not let you fix it! I don't know if my tiny brain can parse this enormous logic; better not try before it starts hurting.

Of course, it is a lot more easy for us Europeans. And no not because we can not grasp 11/9. The unfair thing to the US here is that we have a 'colony-heritage'. We already got to bully around larger parts of the world in our history. Must be hurting to have been left out on that fun: Helping out and Developing other countries does get you straight into heaven.

So. Make more helpless! (before we run short)

*update*: Somebody just pointed out to me that, the US is mostly filled with shipped over Europeans AND that they already got to 'help' the native inhabitants to a large extend.  Of course I do not know if St. Peter will take that as a valid help-count since they started calling the colony 'homeland'?  Any specialists that could solve the issue? Some sanctified Ausie maybe?

If this, results to this: then I'm feeling sad.

It also makes me think about the *freedom* talk I had with rms while driving him through Ghent...Maybe freedom in this case also means people are free to decide not to be in public while still thinking out loud, and rather wait untill they have some code that expresses the thought train more clearly.

In fact, since they can, they will. So grow up an learn to live with it.

By the way, after meeting Ovidiu in person at the Cocoon GetTogether last november, I can only state that the man stands for original creativity and erudition in the most warm, gentle and friendly package you can imagine.

While hoping people can be made to see (and change viewpoints and positions) all my support goes to this lone ranger...

Tuur, ever enthousiastic, off to his first day of school... (which is still kindergarten level for those not known to the typical Belgian 20 year of official training this guy has ahead)

Sharing sense for laughs.

Struggling with bidirectional many-to-many relations in hibernate today I got myself into writing this hack to get junit tests be able to test across more then one thread. (useful for testing out ThreadLocalMaps I guessed?)

public void testSomething throws Throwable {

  // code doing the preparation of the test 

  // typically inserting stuff in a DB 

  // some of these might set some variable, you'll need to declare 

  final Object referenceThing; 

  final Throwable[] exceptionSpace = new Throwable[1]; 

  // making this an inner class makes it more readable I think 

  Thread separateRun = new Thread() { 

    public void run() { 

      try { 

        // here you perform your test code and typically 

        // there is something like: 

        Object calculatedThing = whateverCall(); 

        assertEquals("Quite unexpected", 

          referenceThing, calculatedThing); 

      } catch (Throwable t) { 

        exceptionSpace[0] = t; 

      } 

    } 

  }; 

  separateRun.start(); 

  separateRun.join(); 

  // this trick makes sure you don't miss out 

  // on the AssertionError nested in the other thread. 

  if (exceptionSpace[0] != null) { 

    throw exceptionSpace[0]; 

  } 

}

Bad thing is that the resulting test shows no difference in my hibernate case... have to dig in some more...

The fun thing about a blogging colleague, is that you get to see how ideas become blogs.

I actually wanted to show the world (in my blog), a recent post of my favourite hisitech employee: There was some poetry again, and loads of shared emotions: you should just have a look through the glass ;-)

So this is what happened next: Steven, the all knowing web-indexer, knew (of course) about the archive and looked up the address, and let his imagination go wild at the question 'And that while the list is still not open for public posts?'

Which makes me think about that piece of Bruggen-wisdom: "A sick mind [really] is a joy for ever."

Simon hardly could of picked out a more memorable date then this to be born.

Yep, number 007 in the baby-series is there, and it's another boy... in the gender match the 6-1 makes it hard to turn the outcome with only 5 more to go.

Had a quick visit today already, the whole family (including father and big sister) was doing well. It's sure a lot more fun when nature can have it's way with a lot less medical attention then last time.

Thx to Rik pointing out the vote-advisor, I can refrain from actually doing all the effort he is doing to read all the campaign stuff.

Questions in the poll had too little subtle nuances if you ask me, nevertheless (or because of that) the resulting advisor-profile isn't completely to my disliking.At least they got my utter dislike correct, and the remainder probably shows I'm into nuance and compromise and not into hard-line extreme thinking. (which was my problem with the un-nuanced questions in the first place)

In every case: the algorithm behind all of this should be open-sourced of course :-)