Web Hosting Strategies

Analysis and review of the web hosting and managed services industry by Doug Kaye.

IT Conversation: Anne Thomas Mannes. My latest IT Conversation with Anne Thomas Manes contains so many valuable insights, it's worth a more detailed summary than most. Here are some of the things Anne had to say: Advanced Web Sevices. Anne expects to see WS-Security implemented in software products in 6-12 months. Reliability in the messaging layer will take more than a year. Interoperability. Older products don't interoperate well. Anne recommends the products from Systinet, The Mind Electric, IONA, and CapeClear because they provide the best Java/.NET interop. She says to stay away from Apache SOAP, which was replaced by Apache Axis. Anne is a big fan of WS-I's Basic Profile. Web-Services Protocol Development. We spoke at length about the unusual way in web-services protocols have been developed. As Anne pointed out, web services are all about interoperability, so there was no way to have implementations in advance of the standards--the traditional sequence for standards development. We agreed that progress has been extraordinarily rapid, despite some in the press who complain that it's taking too long. Scalability. I asked her about the lack of real-world scalability testing, and Anne pointed out that we need real-world applications before we can really understand scalability. She specifically mentioned gigabit Ethernet and proposals for compressed XML as technologies that will obviate some of the current inefficiencies of XML. The Future of EAI Vendors. Because good EAI software includes much more than connectivity, it's fairly sticky. By way of comparison, Anne pointed out that even though WebSphere and Web Logic are both based on J2EE, you wouldn't likely switch from one to the other unless you had a specific problem with your current product or its vendor. Good EAI software is equally sticky. SCO Linux Lawsuits. Anne is "very disappointed" with the current situation. She's particularly worried that IBM has raised the issue of the General Public License (GPL) and that SCO is therefore challenging its validity. If the courts finds against the GPL concept, the entire open-source community will be affected. Novell's Acquisition of Ximian. Novell picked up GNOME and Mono, but the latter is the more interesting. Microsoft put C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) into the public domain. They're now ISO/ECMA standards. Mono is an open-source Linux implementation of CLI, which means that compiled (bytecode) versions of C# programs can be run on Linux. Anne says that "C# is Java--The Next Generation." She's a huge fan. If programmers are willing to develop under Windows, C# and Mono may offer them true portability. You can hear this all first hand. It's a great IT Conversation. Posted Wednesday, August 20, 2003 12:09:17 AM

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