Sean Rhody

To paraphrase, "I come not to praise the Browser, but to bury it." Because the cold hard fact of application development is that the browser needs to die. Immediately. It's already caused more than enough damage. This may seem to be a harsh statement. After all, the browser was responsible for the explosion of the Internet. It serves many useful purposes and people do billions of dollars worth of business through it every year. Seemingly, I should be praising the browser, not calling for its execution. Nevertheless, the browser needs to go, and we all know it. It's the dirty secret of the IT world, one we never like to talk about - as a mechanism for delivering a GUI, the browser stinks. Stinks isn't even a strong enough word. The browser was intended to deliver text across the Internet, and it's good at that. So good that people began to piggyback other things onto... (more)

Double Standards

In June I attended the JavaOne conference out in San Francisco, to keep up with what the Java world was doing, and to see how it impacted Web services. I see a number of parallels between Web services and the way that the various Java specifications have been created, and some key differences. But even further, I went to a number of sessions on Web services and was reminded, once again, that the lack of a single standards body is a serious roadblock to implementation of Web services. Now, of course I'm not talking just about UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, and XML. These are pretty much okay ... (more)

UDDI v3.0 Ratified as OASIS Standard (Live at SYS-CON.TV)

The OASIS international standards consortium today announced that its members have approved the  Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) version 3.0.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Advanced through an open process, UDDI is commonly regarded as a cornerstone of Web services, defining a standard method for publishing and discovering network-based software components in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). "The UDDI registry model is one of the central elements of an interoperable framework that ensures the effect... (more)

How Important Is Security?

Recently, Paris Hilton's cell phone was hacked, and all her contact information was released on the Internet. Although I wasn't important enough to rate a listing, many other celebrities were apparently flooded with phone calls after their private numbers became oh-so-public. While the incident didn't involve Web services, it certainly did involve security, or rather a failure of security. And once again, security itself is the focus of this month's issue. Security has been a topic of this magazine almost since its inception - and we tend to get proposals regarding security on a... (more)

Elementary Education

When I was in college, I considered becoming a teacher, but then the thought of the pay scale as well as some time spent substitute teaching convinced me that computers might be a better way to go. I mention this because I never did get the chance to take any education courses, so I don't know if the way we teach the craft of software development is wrong, or just seems that way because I'm not fully aware of all of the issues. If this seems a strange way to begin approaching the concept of enterprise architecture, stay with me for a moment. When I studied Computer Science, the ... (more)