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August 26, 2002
Bug Tracking
Joe Leary on his blog says:
As part of the State Portal project we need a bug tracking system. A quick search of the internet provided a reference to a free bug tracking package that seems simple to install and use.
I'd recommend Bugzilla. My experience in this area is that you want a very good bug tracking system that will scale well. Since we'll want to expand the use of any successful project to other areas and projects, we should use something that can go the distance. Bugzilla will do that.
10:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Correct Use of SOAP
In an article entitled "Web Services: Is it CORBA Redux?" Gordon Van Huizen writes:
Similarly, Web services installations will require a scalable software infrastructure that offers directory services, SOAP routing, service management and pluggable security across the enterprise. Enterprises that fail to plan for this will not be able to fulfill the promise of Web services as its adoption grows.
I like this quote, but its not actually the main point of the article. The main point is (let me put this simply):
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Message-based SOAP: good
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RPC-style SOAP: bad
While I agree and happen to have a good feel for what he's talking about, having been involved in building some pretty large CORBA based applications, I think the overall theme needs expansion and repeating.
There's no silver bullet that will remove the incredible complexity of fine-grained concurrent programming. Moving all the applications further away from each other, having them built by disparate teams, and not being able to ensure that they'll even be there when they're needed makes the problem even more difficult. RPC has been around for three decades. Adding an XML front end to it is just putting lipstick on the pig (and a real ugly color of lipstick at that).
09:22 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Weblog Guidelines
Ray Ozzie has published a set of weblog guidelines for employees. We don't have some of the concerns he mentions (like SEC issues), but much of it is directly applicable. I've stayed away from anything this specific, but I don't see anything here that is too onerous. The one issue I do have is this:
Ozzie's guidelines are very clear that all weblogs are treated as private by an employee who does not represent the company. I think that's entirely reasonable for public weblogs. There need to be official spokespeople. However, in a more inwardly focusing weblog, the product manager for a specific product of the engineering team lead for a project is clearly speaking as an expert on that product or project and should be seen that way, not through layers of disclaimers.
03:03 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Blogs for Students
Scot Hacker is trying to find the right blog for students in a course he's teaching. Regular readers will recognize that as a concern I've had as well. I've always had my students keep lab notebooks and I used a blog for my course last year. This year, I want the lab notebooks online as blogs. Since the course already uses Slashcode, the journal feature is a natural tool to consider. There are even RSS feeds of journals, a key requirement. I think that some students will be taken by blogging, however, and want a more robust tool than the Slashcode journal system. For that, I'd recommend Radio.
10:52 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Blogging and Categorization
This short article in Business 2.0 references our experiment with blogs here in Utah and questions the effectiveness of using a search appliance like the one from Google to turn them into a useful knowledge base. While I'm inclined to agree in theory that categorization is probably better than raw search (that's why I use categories on my blog), I think that this argument is analogous to the Yahoo! vs. Excite (or Altavista or Infoseek) debates of a few years ago.
If you remember, Yahoo!'s claim to fame was human categorization of web sites into topics while the others relied on machine indexing. There's no doubt that the human categorization was useful, but it was also expensive. Eventually an indexing and ranking scheme came along (Google) that was good enough that the debate went away. Now most people use Google and its good enough.
That said, there are some categorization experiments for Radio that I'm anxious to try out.
09:05 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Governor's Remarks at IT Commission
As I mentioned, the Governor appeared at the IT Commission last Thursday and spoke about his IT plan. The Deseret News had a brief story about his remarks and my followup.