Paul Downey

WS-Irony

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Technorati Tags: WebServices, WS-I

2007 01 22

OpenID Does One Small Thing ..

But it does it pretty well: it lets your users use their own ids to login to your site. And that’s it. That way you don’t need to manage their usernames and passwords. But any further questions you might have about your user, like “who the heck are they“, “how old are they”, and “can they pay me” are left quietly unsaid. For now.

Technorati Tags: identity, openid

2007 01 21

Comments (2)

Microformats Metaphor

Cool AOL’er Kevin laid down a challenge on Twitter for a non-technical definition of Microformats. Rather than a definition, I came up with a metaphor:

Microformats are standard colours on a Web page for common things such as “date”, “phone number” or “zip-code” which only a computer can see.

Technorati Tags: microformats

2007 01 15

Aliens Stole My Atom Feed

Something strange happened and for a while I was feeding you all pug-ugly RSS 2.0, but it’s hopefully back to gloriously Valid Atom 1.0 again, all be it with a couple of warnings from the embedded Google Video. Let’s thank Nic, for pointing that out.

Update: it was worse than that, thanks to an interaction between wp-atom10 and wp-cache I was serving it as text/html. Excuse me while I go to stand in the corner of the room.

Technorati Tags: Atom

2007 01 14

Whatfettle 360

A planet all about me, me, me: Whatfettle 360

2007 01 14

BPEL Begone

Anne came out and said it, the BPEL Emperor must be feeling very chilly:

I think BPEL is fundamentally flawed. I don’t think an execution language is the right way to manage orchestration.

Testify! Give me a declarative choreography than imperative orchestration any day.

BPEL is so constrained in its capabilities that almost all vendors have had to extend it to make it do more than just simple orchestrations, and these extensions destroy any potential value that BPEL might provide as a “portable” process execution language.

Right, you’ll never be able to take your BPEL out of one “engine” and plug it into another one. A “standard” which doesn’t enable interoperability or portability is worse than useless, especially one this enterprisey.

Update: added a vote-against link pointing to the Wikipedia page, thus killing two birds with one stone ;-)

Technorati Tags: BPEL, enterprisey, WebServices

2007 01 13

Why LinkedIn?

Like many people I’ve managed to collect a few nice scalps on LinkedIn, but often wondered why. Luckily we have Guy Kawasaki to help us feel like it wasn’t totally pointless after all.

Update: and now they publish your profile using the hresume Microformat. Cool!

2007 01 13

A Moral Tale

Here’s a tale of woe from not so far away, not so long ago …

The board at Megacorp were unhappy; their IT was complex, rigid and brittle. The mess caused by years of building bespoke systems to meet the demands of “next week’s launch”, integrating new products, systems and architectures from companies being bought in, hived off and reorganised meant they could no longer do anything new without breaking lots of things old.

So the CTO looked to Bigvendor to save his job: “your ad-hoc unprofessional developers are to blame”, they said, “make ‘buy not build’ your mantra, embrace our best-of-breed package ‘Broom’, it’s only $$, and you’ll no longer have to be nice to all those badly dressed computing types.”

Unfortunately Broom didn’t quite work out of the box or quite do what it said on the tin, so a swarm of be-suited Broom $$$ consultants infested Megacorp to do the integration and indoctrinate all and sundry in The Way of The Broom. The bristle components were replaced with softer ones to work with Megacorp’s PineFlooring system and Broom’s handles were lengthened to deal with their tables.

Success! So Megacorp ditched most of its developers, the savvy ones leaving first of their own accord.

Meanwhile Bigvendor, who had been using its $$$$$$ wisely, released Broom 2.0 with stiffer bristles and a shorter handle incompatible with Broom 1.0’s.

With a new product on the market, Bigvendor and its consultants quickly lost all interest in maintaining Broom 1.0, especially where the customer has dared to change the bristles and handles.

It was only then that Megacorp realised it didin’t actually own its Broom 1.0 installation, or would ever find anyone able to fix it.

Moral: you have to be daft as a brush not to embrace Open Source.

Update: I’m reminded by someone in Megacorp that actual ratio between $$ and $$$ is estimated to be around 1:80. Oi Veh!

Technorati Tags: Open Source

2007 01 12

Web APIs Are Just Web Sites

A short presentation on how you might like to build a simple “Web API”.

Updated: an accessible version with errata fixes and links:

A Web Friendly API?
Javascript AJAX Python Ruby PHP Perl Curl
[Picture: collection of Web 2.0 logos from flickr, Google, Yahoo!, last.fm, etc]
One thing in common ..
They HATE SOAP
But LOVE The Web
URIs identify stuff
And can be anywhere
[photo of shower head with URI WWW.SPEAKERMAN.COM]
Use cool URIs
Read RFC 2616
Constrain Verbs: GET/HEAD and POST (PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS - YAGNI?)
Ask “IS IT SAFE?” [photo of the dentist from Marathon Man]

Understand HTTP Methods:

method     safe    idempotent   semantics    resource     cacheable
             -----------------------------------------------------------
   GET       |  X          X            X           X             X    |
   HEAD      |  X          X            X           X             X    |
   PUT       |             X            X           X                  |
   POST      |                                                    *    |
   DELETE    |             X            X           X                  |
   OPTIONS   |  X          X            X                              |
             -----------------------------------------------------------
   PROPFIND  |  X          X            X           X             *    |
   PROPPATCH |             X            X           X                  |
   MKCOL     |             *            X           X                  |
   COPY      |             X            X           X                  |
   MOVE      |             ?            X           X                  |
   LOCK      |                          X           X                  |
   UNLOCK    |             X            X           X                  |
   PATCH     |             *            X           X                  |
             -----------------------------------------------------------

think about representations: HTML, RSS/Atom, XML, JSON, whatever
Warning! You are about to see Naked Protocol Headers!

Content-Negotiation:

HTTP GET ...
Accept: application/weatherml+xml; q=1.0,
        application/xml; q=0.8,
        text/html; q=0.5

Apache Server .htaccess
AddType application/weatherml+xml wea
  Options +MultiViews
    ./index.wea
    ./index.xml
    ./index.html

enjoy the free caching

HTTP GET http://flickr.com/photos/psd/2450160
If-Modified-Since:  Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT
If-None-Match: 'guid-21343244324'

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified

make Phone Call

HTTP POST http://example.com/calls
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml; charset=utf-8 

callingParty=tel:+447918808
calledParty=sip:Merlin

=>

HTTP 1.1 201 Created
Location: http://example.com/calls/123213
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8 

<callInfo>
  <callId>http://example.com/calls/123213</callId>
  <callStatus>Initial</callStatus>
</callInfo>

get Call Info

HTTP GET http://example.com/calls/123213
Accept: text/xml 

=>

200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8 

<callInfo>
  <callId> http://example.com/user/fred/calls/123213
  <callStatus> CallInitial
  <callingParty> tel:+447918880...
  <calledParty> tel:+447918880...
  <timeStarted> 2007-01-09 11:45:20
  <duration> 502
  <terminationStatus> CallNotTerminated
</callInfo>

end Call

HTTP POST http://example.com/calls/123213
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded 

callStatus=Terminated 

=> 

202 Accepted
Location: http://example.com/calls/123213

list Recent Calls [Feed Icon]

HTTP GET http://example.com/calls/feed 

=>

200 OK
Content-Type: application/atom+xml 

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title>Phone Calls
  <link rel="self" href="http://example.com/calls/"
        rel="alternate" type="text/html"/>
  <updated>2007-01-0911:45:02Z
  <author><name>Phonebox
  <id>tag:example.com,2007-01-09:/calls
  <entry>
   <link href="http://example.com/user/psd/calls/1234567/"/>
    <title>Call 1234567
    <id>tag:example.com/calls/1234567-200701091223313
    <summary>CallInformation
    <updated>2005-10-13T18:30:02Z
  </entry>
  <entry>
   <link href="http://example.com/user/fred/calls/17231667/"
    ...

Overall:

http://example.com/calls
http://example.com/calls/feed
http://example.com/user/paul/calls/feed
http://example.com/user/paul/calls/7d6374da5
http://example.com/user/paul/calls/search?callingParty=tel:%3A44791888
http://example.com/sms
http://example.com/sms/feed
http://example.com/user/fred/sms/7d6374da5
http://example.com/user/fred/sms/inbox/feed
http://example.com/user/fred/sms/inbox/7d6374da5
http://example.com/user/fred/sms/inbox/search?from=tel:%3A44791888
....

Yes, Dear Reader, there’s no API as such it’s just yet another Web site ..
Surf long and prosper!

Technorati Tags: HTTP, REST, webarch

2007 01 11

Comments (24)