ah! at last ..........

March 03, 2005
Share - Day 3 and a bit of 4
Honestly, this isn't some important analysis that I expect is being read by anyone...it's my own personal reference...
The key thing I've found is this stupid BileBlog send-up of The Server Side. I've been beat over the head incessantly about the API of the day we're not adopting, or what some guy selling a book at TSS said. All the silly IDE wars, JSF, EJB, Spring, JDO...so I thought this was a bit of fun. It's crude, immature, and off-color, so be warned, but it's also hilarious. The internal wars and the personality cults within the Java community are indescribable otherwise.
On the SHARE side, I've fallen into the WEBS track, which essentially is all about Web Services. I don't know exactly how to sum it up yet.
The most valuable thing I've seen at share has been a marathon session to go over the state of the WS-* stuff beyond basic profile. This includes security, coordination, reliable messaging, transactions, profile, and federation. One point I came away with is how these specs are composable. Reliable mesaging, should, of course, be concerned about the integrety of the messages, and watchful that sequences are not hijacked or altered, so you can add security to the interchange, for example.
I think WS-Federation and WS-Trust are important to take apart, and explore more deeply in cooperation with Identity Management efforts. The things I had been looking at before I left were federation standards based on SAML, which would include Liberty Alliance and Shibboleth. It sounds like Liberty is talking with the federation and trust folks, and I'm going to be able to find out some more about Shibboleth this morning, there is another mega-session to go in-depth on WS-Security.
I can see the need to get some of these things up in CoLab, and am working on ways to get folks together to look at all the facets of this stuff.
There was more, of course, about Portals yesterday. It looks like IBM's Portal is very nice. I actually prefer its paridigm for page layout and development tools. The parallels between the IBM Portal and the Oracle Portal, though are quite interesting...the business and integration needs they serve are the same, after all.
The big thing I want to emphaisize is standards around Portals. These are not CMS's, they are integration and application development tools. The tools still seem a bit crude, but you have to think about WSRP and JSR-168 layered over the WS-* standards and BPEL process flows in an SOA architecture, and then the imperative is more apparant. I can see where the individual HTML interface generated by a Servlet is destined to become a thing of the past as the architecture evolves.
On JSF, it sounds like IBM is all about it...though they seem to allow it's immature now.
'nuff for now...I'm about burned out.