{ Monthly Archives }
A slightly mad poster put together on behalf of Osmosoft for tomorrow’s internal Open Source Awareness Day which Phil has printed out in scary A0. Like all my images, I’ve put this under a CC, so feel free to reproduce it, mash it up, do a better job, whatever! [Reddit] [Digg]
Update: There’s now a high quality scan on Archive.org
I’m best pleased Norm and David like Mojo. Both seemed concerned about outing us, but shouldn’t worry. There’s nothing much new there, just a demonstration of what’s possible when you expose services such as BT’s Web21C SDK onto the Web, a continuation of the conversation you may have seen Uros and I push out at Banff Mashing up the Mobile, or heard JP open up for discussion at Supernova. Being able to make phone calls from the likes of Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, bookmark a phone call, or put a feed of your calls into Yahoo! Pipes is pretty exciting, but this really is just the beginning. There’s a bunch more new, great, cool stuff waiting in the wings to follow. As it stands, the API is pretty RESTful, not too dissimilar to S3, and of course we’re investigating OAuth for handling delegation, but we’d appreciate feedback to ensure we’ve got it just right and it’ll work in just about any mashup before launching. Everytime you do something to hurt the web, a LOLcat dies, so we’ve worked hard to keep the kitty collatoral down, but sticking points such as Same Origin Policy, and crappy Web frameworks, (yes, that’s you, ASP.NET), means we may have to allow making phone calls using HTTP GET. Given my strong views on safety that really deserves a separate blog entry of its own.
Anyway, if you have hack-cred and know me, or one of the team, send us your OpenID and we’ll give you a trial. Build something cool, give us some feedback and blog about it, we’ll bung you a few more tokens!
BTW, the picture is the wire-frame Phil knocked up when we first started to talk about Mojo. Awesome retro chic!
And so to darkest Suffolk for an internal “Standards Day” talking to people who work on specs for important things such as saving the company millions ensuring we don’t have to rip cables out of the road because some new spec references “XXX-601″ instead of “XXX-602″ or are tackling world problems such as reducing the overall power consumption of the Internet. Wow. So I couldn’t help but come across as more than a little ‘fluffy’ yammering on about this thing called The Web and citing examples of how chatter on the Web through channels such as Twitter is spawning a series of pidgin languages which arise like chants in a football crowd and lead towards the writing of useful specs such as OAuth. Standards are agreements, but advocating lightweight agreements which arise through continuous, virtuous feedback, amongst the great unwashed were never going to wash with those who have to then convince Government we follow their ICT policy.
To compound matters my usual, careful disassembly of Web services was preceded by a great presentation on how telco vendors and suppliers are all coalescing, yay!, but on WS-*, boo! What’s more, apparently in small way that is my fault as “Chief Web Services Architect”. Yikes!
So after the show, the SOA advocates shuffled off to meet with Michael and I for a spot of coffee and confrontation. However what transpired, I think in many ways surprised us all. During a relaxed and wide ranging conversation exploring resource oriented versus message based architectures, I suddenly realised, there was no argument anymore. Getting all those silly vendors to agree on “something, anything” was the battle, but going forward, it’s obvious the Web has won. All we have to do now is to help those pour souls still trapped in Middleware hell to walk into the light and pass the bovril and blankets. If you know someone still slipping around on the SOAP, don’t hate them, just warn them the longer they continue the sillier they look. They deserve your sympathy, not hate. Just give them lots of hugs!
I’ve one more presentation to give on “Web Services, WTF were you thinking?” which will do doubt contain the slightly iffy slide Make BPEL History!, but which I may run as a “Downey’s Farewell WS-Rant Requests Show”, and then that’s it, I’m going to stop railing about Web services as they’re no longer interesting or relevant anymore. Anyway, I now need a new job title!
Technorati Tags: Web Services
I didn’t record anything yesterday because I got quite into The Future of Web Applications [shows pass, way-hay!] which is an excellent conference, in particular, last night, the Live Diggnation Recording. Madness! Twelve hundred geeks in a high state of exuberance. Yay! Chug! Chug! Good fun, right up to the part where Alex and Kevin invited the audience in its entirety to the FOWA party. I looked over at Ryan Carson who had his head in his hands. It wasn’t going to turn out well, and it wasn’t pretty. Oh well, we still love the Diggnation guys!
Brilliant conference! I find conferences like this really energising, just talking to people, talking to developers, hearing stories like Pownce, three developers, a few thousand dollars, and the do something that’s awesome! And then comparing that to what life is like in a large company where the ability to execute is often safeguarded by people who worry about The Brand. Which is right! But, just going out there, failing fast is just how things have got to be done.
Anyway, more fun today. I’m off to hear about Facebook (they’re Evil ;-) and other stuff. Cool stuff! [Grin][Shrug]
Technorati Tags: vlog
Diggnation
FOWA
Day 4 and the experiment continues. I’ve had some interesting feedback, in particular from Robbie who says “yeah, it’s kinda OK, but you really are depressing!” And he’s right! Yeah, I’ve been a bit sorta depressed, or depressive for quite a while now and I think it’s probably directly attributable to a few things, but top of the list would be lack of hacking. I miss hacking, I love quick, nasty, dirty, but fun hacks and I don’t do any of that any more I seem to have descended into being a project manager [and not a very good one at that!]. Brrrr. Anyway, hopefully tomorrow will be more upbeat because I’ll be at Future of Web Apps. Way-hay!
