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December 10, 2002
Web Services for Payment Portal
Speaking of web services, one of Utah's Enterprise eGovernment projects is a common payment portal. Lloyd Johnson is the project executive. Back when we were building payment gateways for First Data Corp., one of the biggest parts of the job was creating SDKs in all the languages that people wanted to interface to it with. As I found out over the weekend, SOAP can solve that problem with a lot more finesse. I don't know that Axis is the right tool, but putting a SOAP front end on the payment portal would be a very slick way of allowing language independence.
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Utah Tech Alliance Web Services Meeting
I'm speaking at the Utah Tech Alliance's Web Services Meeting tomorrow morning. Here's a copy of the slides I'm going to use. The talk is based on my "Enabling Web Services" white paper with a few slide thrown in about why government should care. I'll be blogging the meeting as I can---maybe I'll feel better about missing Supernova.
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Information Week Article
My blog gets an mention in this Information Week article on Radio allowing you to do more with less.
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Grid Computing for Content Delivery
This article in InfoWorld discusses Kontiki's grid based content delivery system. The basic concept is Napster with an eye to what enterprises need. They've taken it one step further and removed the user from having to decide which peer to download from (remember the traffic lights on Napster?) so that downloading from the system is transparent. Just point and click. When people talk about "grid computing" the analogy is usually something about computing utilities, but this is a real world example of a grid solving a real world problem: file downloads. So, next time you hear grid, think content delivery.
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One of the Things I'll Miss
One of the great things about being a CIO is that you can get technology questions answered quite quickly most of the time. Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend of mine at the David Chase Cafe (great place, btw) and he complained that his T68i phone didn't get very good reception at his house near there. Sure enough, I pulled out my phone and I had no bars. Today ATTWS was in the office for another meeting and so I asked about it. My question was whether they'd built out all their cell sites with GSM/GPRS or were still making capital investments. The answer is that all current cell sites are GSM/GPRS capable, but that the wavelength used for GSM doesn't travel as far as the frequency they use for TDMA. ATTWS still needs to fill in some of the gaps and has a capital plan for 2003 to do so. So, Bill, there's your answer.
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Good Enough is Best
I've received some comments on some of my recent posts of Google and WSIL. Here are a few:
Umm..Google is hardly comprehensive. It misses about 90% of what goes on and, for that matter of fact, the ability to "text mine" is far different from the ability to comprehend what you extract.
Oy. Where do I start? WS-Inspection (WSIL) is a way of querying a server for what Web Services it provides. It has some primitive linking capabilities, but basically, it is complementary to UDDI, not competitive. More importantly, you could not replace UDDI with it.
While I don't disagree with either of these points, I think they kind of miss a key fact: Good Enough is Best. A realtively well-known essay called Lisp: Good News/Bad News/How to Win Big by Richard P. Gabriel has a section called The Rise of Worse is Better which describes how a school of thinking - worse is better - leads to market winning products. I like to think of it as "good enough is best."
As techies, we're often too concerned with building the perfect solution instead of the solution that works good enough. The fact is that google works very well and does so much right now that most people are continually amazed at it. Does that mean that there won't be (or isn't) anything better? Of course not. But getting mind share for that better thing will be difficult because google already solves most of the search problems people have right now.
As for UDDI, where do I begin? UDDI, in trying to be all things, is nothing. Show me the masses rushing to adopt it. My point about WSIL and google is not that its equivalent to UDDI, but that it would solve most of the problems people have right now and do it in a way that is simple, easy to deploy, and doesn't require huge investments in infrastructure. If UDDI comes along later, great. But I'm not holding my breath.