Thursday March 30, 2006
…Fuse, not Flowfuse - unfortunately. 
Fuse is an opensource product based on ActiveMQ and ServiceMix by Logiblaze (James Strachan et al.) and is definitely worth a closer look. I think it has a real chance to become the JBoss of EAI platforms - especially after ActiveMQ seems to have some strong supporters.
Posted on Mar 30, 2006 at 17:42 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Monday March 27, 2006
I’ll be attending a team event at Bosch for all new employees (within the IT unit) from Monday until Wednesday. I like these kinds of events, b/c you get to know people from differents departments you wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Funny Sidenote: Although it’s only 20 min. drive from Stuttgart, we were all asked to stay overnight at the hotel were the events takes place. Being usually very costs-conscious, this is pretty unusual for Bosch..
Update: It was a great event and I met many great colleagues.
Posted on Mar 27, 2006 at 10:14 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Tuesday March 21, 2006
I just updated to Wordpress 2.0.2 - very straight forward. Please let me know if you experience any problems.
Btw: To play with the templates and style sheets to improve the look of the page (and maybe the page structure), I installed XAMPP. It is a distribution of Apache tools like the web server, PHP, and more and comes with slick installer. I wish I knew about it earlier.
Posted on Mar 21, 2006 at 20:18 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Saturday March 18, 2006
Elliotte Rusty Harold states that “CSS layouts that are almost as inflexible and inaccessible as the table based layouts they replace.” In this article “Put Content First” he suggests this page structure:
<body>
<div id="content">
<h2>Article Title</h2>
<div class="entrytext">
Article Text
</div>
<div class="comments">
Comments go here
</div>
</div>
<div class="navigation">Next and previous links</div>
<div id="header">site header</div>
<div id="sidebar">site sidebar</div>
<div id="footer">site footer</div>
</body>
Note that navigation and header come after the content - CSS is supposed to order it correctly in a standard browser environment. Screenreaders would be able start with what is important - the article itself and the navigation right after it.
I actually don’t know whether this possible, but it certainly makes CSS design harder. Maybe I will try to improve the CSS for this blog some time.
Posted on Mar 18, 2006 at 18:30 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Friday March 17, 2006
Working in the platform and architecture department in a big cooperation, it is an everyday challenges to bring the platform development standards and architecture to all local subsidiaries around the globe. Therefore the following comparison table by James McGovern is quite interesting for me (found via Benda Michelson):
| EA 1.0 | EA 2.0 |
|---|---|
| Abstract Authority | Community |
| Project Oriented Management | Strong Technical Leadership |
| Comprehensive Documentation | Working Software |
| Following a Plan | Responding to Change |
| Governance | Stewardship |
| Rationalization | Innovation |
| Outsourcing | Open Sourcing |
| NDA | Declarative Living |
| Large Analyst Firms | Small Analyst Firms |
| Management | Leadership |
| ERP for IT | Burndown |
| CMMI | Agile Methods |
| Best Practices | Practical Considerations |
| Reference Architectures | Shared Vision |
| Time Accounting | Functional Delivery Accounting |
| Buy vs. Build | Buy vs. Build vs. Open |
| Project Oriented | Service Oriented |
| Politics | Diplomacy |
| Polarization | Dialog |
| Buy-in | Enlistment |
| Restrictions | Rights |
| Cathedral Style Development | Bazaar Style Development |
| Process | People |
Guess which one I do prefer!
Posted on Mar 17, 2006 at 21:27 (MET) | Permalink | 1 comment
Thursday March 16, 2006
Java.net asks a (not so) stupid question: What’s the deal with serialVersionUID? Well, if you want to de-/serialize Java objects in different JVMs (e.g. when sending classes via JMS to other JVMs) it might be interesting for you. These articles provide some insight:
If you read (and understand) all this stuff, you won’t end up in ClassCastExceptions, etc.
Posted on Mar 16, 2006 at 23:26 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Sunday March 12, 2006
Recently, the Mozilla Foundation annouced the winners of the Extend Firefox Contest. As I hadn’t used many Firefox plugins before, I took some time to check out some plugins. Here are my results:
Btw: I’ve also tried out some ad blockers, but I didn’t find one which convinced me. For now Firefox’s “Block images from …” is the only ad blocker for me.
Posted on Mar 12, 2006 at 18:08 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Wednesday March 8, 2006
Today, I will be attending the meeting of the Stuttgart chapter BPM Club Germany. It will take place at Abaxx, a software company literaly down the road, which provides portal products (haven’t had a closer look at it though).
Update: The meeting was ok - 20+ interesting people from very different backgrounds (from “business” business process managers, management consultants to developers like me). However, there weren’t any particular new insights to the topic. Example: Everyone agreed on the difficulty in bridging the gap between business process modelling tools and the development modelling tools. Nevertheless I will join the next meeting.
Posted on Mar 8, 2006 at 07:30 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
Monday March 6, 2006
What do you do, if you’re stuck with a proprietary class model (such as webMethods’ internal datastructure)?
I can only recommend DynaBeans. It took me a good 2 hours to write a DynaBean (and DynaClass) implementation (sorry, no opensource) which recursively wraps webMethods datastructure (IData) object models. That way, its possible to use the result of webMethods services in my favourite taglib Displaytag as well as a range of other for data mapping, such as JXPath without any intermediate class model.
Posted on Mar 6, 2006 at 21:05 (MET) | Permalink | 2 comments
Thursday March 2, 2006
While reading Web Services Platform Architecture, I asked myself repeatedly whether all those WS-Something specifications are really needed or whether people are just reinventing the wheel (this time using XML and SOAP).
But there seems to be more to come. The current discussion (here, here and here) is about WS-ReliableMessaging and the possible need for WS-QueuedMessaging.
In particular the WS-ReliableMessage spec does not require endpoints to persist messages, and the shortcomings of that (guaranteed delivery, etc.). To overcome these issues James proposed a kind of WS-QueuedMessaging spec, which should deal with message durability, message expiration, message priority, browsing of queues, etc.
So, there is more to come and I do admit that cross-platform interoperability makes sense, but I feel like Dan:
(Now I’m wondering if I’m like one of those people who won’t give up assembly programming… Am I not embracing the future for “performance reasons”? Or am I being realistic? […])
PS: In case you are interested, there are other interoperable protocols out there such as Open Wire.
Posted on Mar 2, 2006 at 20:09 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment
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