In-the-Clouds-with-SOA-XML-and-the-Open-Web

Epilog Like many of us, I'm a kind of addicted to Twitter. But a few weeks ago, the admins of my client cuts the connection to Twitter and all of the known anonymanizers like "agentanon". My hands began to tremble, my work became poorer and poorer (just a joke!). Two lucky circumstances: * first free weekend since many month * my SAP PRD server is already up and connected to the internet, because I have a presentation on Monday Why don't turn a problem into a challenge and develop my own "ABAP twitter client" ?

Nice to find my blog here ;)

Recent musings in the blogosphere on the demise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) have prompted many of you to ask me for my views on this topic. While I don't want to address any specific article, I do want share a few of my thoughts on the future of SOA.

IT Service Desk with SAP CRM 7.0: With this blog I would like to make you familiar with the new IT service desk solution we offer with the latest SAP CRM release, SAP CRM 7.0.

A pessimistic approach towards SOA seems to prevail in some blogs. But these opinions strike me by surprise. In the industries I am working for - public sector, healthcare and Defense/ public security - SOA is predominant and you will find only rare examples of tenders where SOA is not highlighted as the guiding principle for the whole architecture. SAP's CTO Vishal Sikka has already provided the community with some very helpful insights concerning these discussions. I just want to add some points from an architect's point of view: From my point of view it is not the SOA approach itself which should be questioned but the way how we architects sometimes work on SOA. Some of the mistakes that are listed below I have encountered during my SOA projects. Others are based on discussions with other architects and decision makers inside and outside SAP, from customers and from partners. My intention is simple: I want to help to avoid these mistakes in the future and to strengthen the SOA approach which is for me without an alternative.

Keep SOA as simple as possible!

What is SAP Solution Manager?

Vor nicht all zu langer Zeit schien es völlig klar, dass der Weg für eine interoperable Kommunikation zwischen Anwendungen mit unterschiedlichen Entwicklungszyklen über Web Services führen muss. In letzter Zeit jedoch ist immer häufiger die Rede von einer leichtgewichtigen, einfacheren Alternative: Web Services auf Basis von REST (REpresentational State Transfer).

SOA ist nicht tot - SOA ist Mainstream

New Diigo group with overlapping subject matter, more focused on the web.

Glide 3.0 has been released and it is excellent! Does not yet run on a Treo, but htings are looking great. The sync program is very intriguing, and they seem to have a well thought out hosting model. Way beyond Google Docs and Zoho. Not much information on the file format side of things. Glide is written in Flex with native OS adaptations written in C-C++. Optimized for Firefox. I'm still ocnfused about the browser vs. Flex runtime (VM).

Adobe's Erik Larson introduces Acrobat.com. His blog comments echo his post in response to an article at ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9091678 In the CW article, Guy Creese of the Burton Group holds the line, defending, as expected, the Microsoft alighnment of MSOffice, Exchange and SharePoint.

The developer site for OpenSolaris High Performance Computing project. Site contains major clues about things to come with OpenSolaris, e.g., the Projects index page includes entries for KDE and Gnome porting projects.

good interview with Kevin Lynch about the future of the Web. Covers AIR, Flex, Flash, Silverlight and how the Web is moving from universal access and exchange of documents to that of applications. Lynch places Adboe products into a larger context of which problems these inventions solved. The new problem is that of expanding the Web to the desktop through these emerging universal applications.

The IOWA Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust suit evidence is now publicly available. This ZDNet Talkback posts an extraordinary eMail from Bill Gates concerning the need to control MSOffice formats and protocols as Microsoft pushes onto the Web. The key point is that Chairman Bill understands that the real threat to Microsoft is that of Open Web formats and protocols outside of Microsoft's control. It's 1998, and the effort to "embrace and eXtend" W3C HTML, XHTML, SVG and CSS isn't working well. The good Chairman notifies the troops that MSOffice must come up with another plan. Interestingly, it's not until 2001, when OpenOffice releases an XML encoding of the OpenOffice/StarOffice imbr that Microsoft finally sees a solution! (imbr = in-memory-binary-representation) The MSOffice crew immediately sets to work creating a similar XML encoding of the MSOffice binary (imbr) dump. The first result is released in the MSOffice 2003 beta as "WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML". XML was designed as a structured language for creating specific structured languages. OpenOffice saw the potential of using XML to create an OpenOffice specific XML language. MSOffice seized the innovation and the rest is history. Problem solved! So what was the "problem" the good Chairman identified in this secret eMail? It's that the Web is the future, and Microsoft needed to find a way of leveraging their existing desktop document "editor" monopoly share into owning and controlling the Web formats produced by Microsoft applications. MSOffice OOXML is the result. ISO approval of MSOffice OOXML is beyond important to Microsoft. It establishes MSOffice "editors" as standards compliant. It also establishes the application, platform and vendor specific MSOffice OOXML as an international "open" standard. Many will ask why this isn't a case of Microsoft actually opening up the MSOffice formats in compliance with government antitrust demands. It is "compliance", but not in the sense of what

list of email evidence presented in the antitrust action Microsoft rushed to settle.

Another JavaSript library concept, but this time secure. Not as robust as jQuery, but Yahoo is off to a great start. wikiWORD could use this for dynamic page generation.

Aaron Miller writes about the limitations and difficulties with ePUB. He suggests a new format, "BOOK" based on ePUB but web ready. BOOK is an AJAX format in that it includes (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript! Excellent stuff! The discussion on this page is one of the best on the Web. ePUB gets thrashed, but with arguments very difficult to contest. The web is everything, and Aaron's friends fully understand this. Sadly, the ePUB crowd does not. I found this site looking to solve the problem of numbered lists in ePUB.