Donald Gould: a good one

Donald Gould sounds like he was an amazing person. A truly good person. His obituary tells of how he died in the process of helping someone. Helping people was at his core.

I only knew of him through a presentation I heard on IT Conversations. He was working to change the world through totally amazing and innovative ways. Ways that were self sustaining, not dependent on billions of charity. You can see them at Pure Water for All.

My thoughts are with his family and friends. My prayers are that there are many more like Mr Gould out in the world…we need more Donald Gould’s.

go listen to him…in his own voice…NOW!

Daryl Plummer on ‘Web Services At A Crossroads’

Daryl Plummer is the (only?) Gartner person that consistently makes sense to me.

From Optimize Magazine: Web Services At A Crossroads:

“Users fall into two camps. One group advocates using Web services to build complex internal systems known as enterprise service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The other seeks to use emerging Web technologies in tandem with Web services to create flexible external applications. Their divergent approaches each require different organizational skill sets.

The split began in 2003, when companies such as BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems questioned whether mission-critical systems were possible with Web services as originally defined. Over the next two years, the Web took on new significance as Google’s use of advanced techniques and Web services began to get widespread notice.

When it comes to building SOAs, I can’t get over how much effort is wasted trying to force Web services to deliver enterprise-level capabilities they were never intended to handle. For example, managers at a well-known airline once asked me how to make their Web services provide an enterprise-level distributed-transaction environment, given the shortcomings of the Web services standards. ‘Did you consider using a real distributed transaction environment instead of Web services?’ I asked. The looks on their faces indicated they hadn’t.”

Tim Bray has some pointed comments on Mr Plummer’s article. While I think they are reasonable, I think Mr Plummer’s paints the big picture well.

Finally, it reminds me of something Don Box said about supporting REST and WS-*.

NetNewsWire beta

I’m looking forward to trying out the NetNewsWire beta. Cross platform syncing is the thing I’ve wanted but didn’t do anything about. If it works, I’ll likely buy FeedDemon in addition to my more commonly used NetNewsWire.

Concerns

A post or two ago I wrote about “considerations.”  Well, after considering it, I think I’m wrong and what I meant to say was “concerns.”  Concerns is around AOP.  My original note was something I wrote on a piece of paper during a presentation by a VP in HP, and he was saying considerations.

But I digress.  Considerations…Concerns…either way there is a buzzword brewing here once we get past Web 2.0.