Father James Keller, the founder of a religious order called The Christophers
and a popular religious television and radio personality in his day, wrote an
amusing story about Mozart. He said, "A young man, just beginning the study
of musical composition, once went to Mozart and asked him the formula for
developing the theme of a symphony. Mozart suggested that a symphony was
rather an ambitious project for a beginner; perhaps the young man might
better try his hand at something simpler first. 'But you were writing
symphonies when you were my age' the student protested. 'Yes, but I didn't
have to ask how.'"
Mozart was able to compose monumental symphonies out of simple melodic
themes. Moreover, Mozart's symphonies always appear to work well as a whole.
If there are bug... (more)
The American comedian and actor Steven Wright once said, "It doesn't make a
difference what temperature a room is, it's always room temperature." Words
are wonderful that way. They can give you a little blast of pleasure when
used cleverly, but like everything else they are subject to fashion. For
example, I was speaking at a technical conference recently when I overheard a
person whom I... (more)
Web Services orchestration, management, and security are among the principal
challenges facing implementers of Service Oriented Architectures. There is
still much confusion in the IT community about the standards themselves,
which are at various stages of maturity. Also, their relevance to enterprise
IT and how they might someday be able to effectively work together is often
unclear.
Th... (more)
Mae West said, "When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one
I've never tried before." But, sometimes, when choosing between two equally
appealing options, the best policy is to take both. WS-ResourceFramework and
WS-Transfer, two new specifications for accessing XML representations of
resources through Web Services have been announced. Although it's not
uncommon to find... (more)
One day, Snow White decided to deploy a Web service. Her IT dwarves
immediately went to work and were pleasantly surprised to find how easy it
was to create the Web service using modern development tools. To Snow White's
development dwarves, it almost seemed like magic.
Since Snow White's cottage was a Java shop, they deployed the Web service in
their J2EE application server, but they cou... (more)