non-political post
but now that you are adequately convinced of my deficient writing and communication skills, we can skip straight to the meat:
I was amazed at the amount of market analysis that confirms my amazingly optimistic 'gut feelings' about web services. a few of the key pieces are a summary of an official Radicati Group report stating that the market for web services solutions, management, integration, and security will be worth $6.2 billion by 2008. another is a brief article showing web service project spending by firms has survived the economic slow-down, leading to a market of several billion dollars over the next few years, so say analysts.
with things like this going around, I find it hard to recognize other developers' interest in anything else. I'm having limited success and un-limited frustration finding more developers that would be willing to contribute free time and resources to an open-source project in this vein, but I've never doubted that with a good amount of persistence, some of those billions can make their way into my pocket, and yours, if you want to help out.
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aversion to new stuff
from a sales-person for an IT product designed to handle data integration and business process management. nearly in the same breath, this person both says that their product embraces XML so much that much of their product runs off of XML-defined processes (BPML, specifically). but also bashes XML in comparison to EDI for b2b ecommerce.
they said that people went to XML and found out it was too flexible to be viable.
WTF?
now, I thought it would be in the best interest of a firm to be able to work with their data in their own way, such that they could adjust for the various demands of their business...but I guess that's not right. what we should do is have everyone use exactly the same kind of information to describe not only what, but how to display, an invoice, or a purchase order, or a Cementing Template. rather than let firms, or even industry comittees, adopt their data representations to fit their needs, we should all cling to out-dated and cryptic formats, described by either printed documents or proprietary schemas?
the flexibility of XML is its boon. if my firm needs to digitally receive price list updates from a small, non-technically-oriented vendor, we can work up an .xsd and send it to them in a matter of a few minutes. or, we could spend a few hours looking for the right EDI transaction set to use, and then bicker with them about the version, and any exceptions, oh, and yeah, they can't afford a VAN or and EDI parser. oops.
this guy was from a mega-corp that is used to dealing with mega-corps and it's obvious. this stuff is why I'm so excited about lamp5. none of these monolithic dinosaurs realize that open-source, open standards, and the internet are going to end up making the entire IS industry MORE disperse, flexible, and dynamic. it probably scares them too much that they won't control any portion of the market anymore. they will have to out-perform their competitors to keep customers. something these shops are not accustomed to.
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welcome
If you already know about web services, you'll know the name, 'WS-RandomThoughts', is a play on the naming conventions used in 2g (2nd generation) web services technologies. see http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/#drafts
I'm abandoning my xanga, since it was and is basically limited to draining brain power from OSU students who somehow become convinced that their social interactions deserve eternal digital archiving rights, no matter how insignificant and pointless said interactions are.
if you came here from lamp5, don't take my opinions to represent all of the lamp5 community, as I am just one member, and probably one of the less inteligent members, too.
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