July 2004 - Posts
I keep a blog because it is a good way to share information and be part of a community. At times I post information to soliticit feedback and help people solve problems that I have encountered. For example, I have a post about forcing a postback using asp.net http://weblogs.asp.net/mnolton/archive/2003/06/04/8260.aspx. It has been found on google and a lot of information is shared. Whether every comment is valuable is not really the point. The point is sharing information. The vast majority of people are good citizens and share information.
I also own a Kiosk Framework that is now deployed across the country with one of the largest cable providers in the US. It enables their customers to handle millions of dollars in transactions a year and it links up nicely with their underlying billing systems using web services. Occassionally I post about what I have learned (not trade secrets) and others having similar situations post comments. If you find the information helpful, great. I am truly glad it helped. However, sometimes people read a comment and tell a person to drop them an email to discuss it away from the blog. Or they come and take their questions off line away from the blog. This is not the point. If people post questions to the blog, then answer on the blog. Do not take it off-line. If you have personal interests that you are trying to protect, then do not post a comment and do not take it off-line and don't try to solicit information if you aren't willing to share it yourself. If I see it happen, I will delete the comment. I keep my blog to share information because I find it a valuable source of information and I want to contribute. So be a good blogging citizen.
-Mathew Nolton
Justin Gehtland, a writer for theserverside.net, wrote a nice little article about writing better, faster, lighter programming in .Net. A link to it can be found on TheServerSide.Net here http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=27499. The actual article is here http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/07/14/BFLJava.html
It provides good tips on some principles to follow when building a system.
I came across this article and found it interesting. It discusses using different patterns to decouple objects in a complex system.
http://www.coldewey.com/publikationen/Decoupling.1.1.PDF
I have been architecting webservice solutions in Production for 2 years now and I have both .Net and Java clients. Developing in .Net means that there is little to no additional effort with working with .Net clients. Proxy generation goes smoothly just about everytime. There are a few subtle nuances with working with the WSESettings plugin for VS.Net but overall it is pretty smooth.
However, working with Java clients is a bit hit or miss. For example, I am working on an Interactive TV Project (very cool project) that is using the Glue tool now owned by WebMethods to consume my webservices. This Java tool cannot handle properties of type DateTime or Enumeration when they are defined as attributes in the WSDL contract. They must be elements which is against our present standard (simple types as attributes...complex types as elements). I modified the contract to accomodate them...but it is always something with Java clients (Glue does have a serious leg-up on handling exceptions relative to .Net 1.1 so the same can be said for .Net i am sure.)
On my side I have used BEA's IDE and was very impressed with its intuitive ease of use but I don't know how compliant it is with the WSDL spec and interacting with .Net webservices. Anyone out there know of a java good tool.
It would be nice to have an independent site judge different releases of tools (.net and java...maybe i will put this on the next iteration of my site) and get comments and articles from developers about how well a particular tool works....
-Mathew Nolton
I am going to be writing another article for TheServerSide.Net. I wrote an article back in March about using Validators in the Middle-Tier http://www.theserverside.net/articles/showarticle.tss?id=Validators .
This new article will be about using Object Databases. With so much going on about using O/R Mapper technology, I believe it is important that we as a community take a look at addressing the issue of data and object persistence and not always assuming that relational databases are the answer.
Why build a better mousetrap such as an O/R Mapper when you aren't hunting for mice.....
-Mathew Nolton
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