By Simeon Simeonov  This is a call to action to everyone building clients, servers and frameworks for rich Internet applications (RIAs) to improve the life of RIA developers by improving the debugging of backend services RIAs depend on. I’d like to thank the people who’ve offered valuable feedback and... Sep. 17, 2008 07:00 AM Reads: 1,219 Replies: 2 |
By Simeon Simeonov  I've been around software for 20 years now. Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the progress we've made. The end results have been amazing but the process of building software hasn't fundamentally changed since the 80s. In fact, I see us make some of the same mistakes over and ov... May. 9, 2007 09:15 PM Reads: 114,543 Replies: 18 |
By Simeon Simeonov In the old TV world you'd make the most money if you could just turn all the TVs on in every household, tie people to their couches and prop their eyelids open. To online businesses - both the majors and those serving niche content - choice is good and the Net's ability to support infi... Jan. 23, 2007 12:30 PM Reads: 3,617 |
By Simeon Simeonov Emergence is a strong, albeit sometimes unpredictable force. The past two weeks have been full of some interesting conversations/observations. Google bought JotSpot. I was reminded yet again that Google Calendar is a great product, Gmail is a strange one and Docs and Spreadsheet are ne... Nov. 4, 2006 01:45 PM Reads: 13,483 Replies: 1 |
By Simeon Simeonov  With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another-this time velvet-revolution. E-commerce 2.0 is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now 10+ year old predecessor. It's about time. Sep. 30, 2006 12:15 PM Reads: 22,308 Replies: 4 |
By Simeon Simeonov  With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another &emdash; this time velvet &emdash; revolution: 'E-commerce 2.0' is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now ten-plus year old predecessor. It's about time. Sep. 21, 2006 12:15 PM Reads: 22,297 Replies: 1 |
By Simeon Simeonov 'Metcalfe's Law is Wrong,' contended Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly recently in a much-discussed IEEE Spectrum article, in which they wrote: 'Of all the popular ideas of the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was Metcalfe's Law.' Sim Simeonov disagr... Aug. 19, 2006 08:45 AM Reads: 23,555 Replies: 6 |
By Simeon Simeonov  I've been around software for 20 years now. Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the progress we've made. The end results have been amazing, but the process of building software hasn't fundamentally changed since the 80s. In fact, I see us making some of the same mistakes over and... Aug. 28, 2005 12:00 PM Reads: 13,561 Replies: 1 |
By Simeon Simeonov The challenge of integrating software and systems will always be with us. In the brief but turbulent history of information technology, creation and destruction go hand in hand. Old technologies and approaches give way to new ones, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a fight. Yet, in ... Feb. 27, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 14,981 |
By Simeon Simeonov In 1975 Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist who created the Pascal programming language, published a seminal book entitled Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. If Wirth had written about business applications, Computing + Storage = Applications would have been a better titl... Feb. 27, 2003 12:00 AM Reads: 18,278 |
By Simeon Simeonov There's been much recent controversy about the role of Microsoft and IBM in the evolution of Web services standards. At a conference I attended not so long ago a pundit talked about the 'standard setting duopoly.' Several articles have been written about the 'undemocratic' practices of... Sep. 27, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 12,853 |
By Simeon Simeonov You must have seen them - they're everywhere. Despite the market climate, Web services startups are popping up like mushrooms after rain. With no time to lose, these companies are readying themselves to take on the industry gorillas. Who's going to win? Sep. 27, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 12,709 |
By Simeon Simeonov Call me a cynic, but I don't think companies participate in standards development out of altruism. Enterprises are in the business of making their products and technologies successful. In an increasingly interconnected technology landscape, standards are the keys to interoperability. May. 30, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 15,120 |
By Simeon Simeonov It's been a long time since the last XML in Transit column. Did you miss my musing on Web services? I doubt it. More likely, you were busy keeping up with all the new initiatives in the Web services space. Those of you with corporate responsibilities were probably wondering how to get... Apr. 18, 2002 12:00 AM Reads: 13,452 |
By Simeon Simeonov This article is based on the UDDI chapter in Building Web Services, to be released this month. It appears here in slightly different form by permission of the publisher, Sams. Contributors to the book are Doug Davis, Steve Graham, Yuichi Nakamura, and Ryo Neyama from IBM; Toufic Boubez... Dec. 3, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 14,537 |
By Simeon Simeonov There was a period around 1999-2000 when anything XML was hyped beyond belief. An XML-centric GUI tool, no matter how narrow in focus, attracted interest and, often enough, VC funding. The net result was a myriad of XML tools - really XML gadgets - that tried to address a large number ... Nov. 20, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 13,105 |
By Simeon Simeonov This article is based on the UDDI chapter in Building Web Services (Sams), a book I've written with Doug Davis, Steve Graham, Yuichi Nakamura, and Ryo Neyama from IBM, Toufic Boubez from Saffron Technology, and Glen Daniels from Macromedia. It's scheduled for release early next month. Nov. 20, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 15,206 |
By Simeon Simeonov As we look at the evolution of both object and component programming models it's clear that the concept of an object or component registry is an essential element that facilitates the discovery and use of components. Nov. 1, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 20,560 |
By Simeon Simeonov In the last installment of XML in Transit (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 5), we established a framework for Web Services usage. The key roles in the framework are service providers, requesters, and brokers (see Figure 1). Moreover, the basic Web Services use workflow involves five steps (see Fi... Jul. 10, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 12,972 |
By Simeon Simeonov In my last XML in Transit column (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 5) we looked in detail at the technical aspects of the service description layer of the Web Service interoperability stack (see Figure 1). In fact, the topic of our discussion - Web Services Description Language - has now been subm... Jun. 3, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 13,210 |
By Simeon Simeonov It's time to look at the details of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) specification and, in particular, how abstract information about Web services is represented in XML and which extensibility mechanisms enable the binding of abstract specifications to concrete implementati... May. 22, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 14,020 |
By Simeon Simeonov In 'The Interoperability Stack' (XML in Transit, Vol. 2, issue 1), I presented my view of the Web service interoperability stack, a layered architecture for analyzing the different technologies involved at various levels of interoperability (see Figure 1). Here we begin our climb u... Feb. 4, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 13,776 |
By Simeon Simeonov For the past six months we've looked in detail at the nuts and bolts of XML protocols, Web services, and XML data encoding. These are the foundation technologies of next-generation Internet distributed applications. In the next several months, I'll focus on another, no less important a... Jan. 8, 2001 12:00 AM Reads: 12,932 |
By Simeon Simeonov I just came back from the first face-to-face meeting of the W3C working group on XML Protocol (is it just me, or is the name somewhat odd-sounding?), and I'm wondering what topics to exclude from this column. Yes, that's right - exclude. Encoding data in XML is a difficult topic for ma... Dec. 21, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 15,454 |
By Simeon Simeonov In my last XML in Transit column (XML-J, Vol. 1, issue 5) I promised to complete my trilogy on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) by addressing the aspects of the latest specification that we haven't covered yet: intermediaries, error handling, and data encoding. Forgive me for devia... Oct. 16, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 13,676 |
By Simeon Simeonov The last edition of the XML in Transit column (XML-J, Vol. 1, issue 4) introduced the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Instead of dwelling on technical issues, it focused on the driving forces behind the technology. Sep. 14, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 16,070 |
By Simeon Simeonov I wanted to kick off this new column on XML protocols with an introduction to the hot newcomer in this arena - Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Trouble is, there are too many ways to go about the topic. The first version I wrote was a technical introduction to SOAP laced with refe... Aug. 18, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 13,108 |
By Simeon Simeonov XML protocols can be broadly classified into two generations. First-generation protocols are based purely on XML 1.0. Second-generation protocols take advantage of two revolutionary XML standards - XML Namespaces and XML Schema. This article analyzes the reasons why we need to make a s... Jun. 15, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 12,719 |
By Simeon Simeonov It wasn't long ago that computer industry pundits still thought that COM and CORBA would become the Internet business-to-business (B2B) integration infrastructure. Yet nowadays B2B integration on the Internet is done using XML on top of simple protocols such as HTTP, FTP and SMTP. The ... Apr. 12, 2000 12:00 AM Reads: 14,452 |