The IT Strategy Letter
A digest of Doug Kaye's weblogs
for the week ending December 9, 2002
(Subscribe)
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Web Services Strategies |
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Web Services Strategies
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Loose Coupling, Continued. Gordon Weakliem asks, "I wonder if it's fair to say that loosely coupled systems trade design and development-time performance for runtime performance." I think it's more a question of granularity. When you have lots
of low-level, tightly coupled RPC-style interactions, performance
can be a real issue. But when services exchange larger self-describing
documents asynchronously, there's actually less total overhead.
We worry about the performance of XML parsers when we use RPC-style
APIs because there are so many individual messages to parse. SOAP
looks like a pretty clunky way to move small amounts of information,
hence REST or XML-RPC. When moving coarser-grained documents,
SOAP and XML account for a smaller percentage of the overall required
processing power and bandwidth utilization. [See the previous
issue for more on loose copuling.] |
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Digital
Identity Is Not Just About Security Anymore. Carol Coye
Benson writes, "Think of the value that shared authentication
brings to the party." A good perspective on the marketing value
of digital identity, even though Carol knows I think the value
to merchants doesn't justify the
privacy risk to consumers. [Source: Glenbrook Partners] |
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The
Five Biggest Myths About Web Services. Bob Sutor, IBM's
#1 web-services evangelist, tries to dispell rumors, and correct
some of the hype. No new ideas here, but still a helpful short
article that appropriately contradicts some of what the misinformed
sources are reporting. |
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E-Business*Standards*Today
Weekly Wire. If you're not already a subscriber, I recommend
this weekly email newsletter edited by Alan Kotok at DISA. It's
a summary (with hyperlinks) of many announcements and developments
in X12, ebXML, and e-commerce web services. I usually find something
valuable in Alan's list that I don't come across anywhere else.
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Merrill
Lynch Is Bullish on Web Services. Not on the investment
side, but "We see huge potential in web services, both in terms
of re-engineering our overall cost structure and, just as importantly,
in allowing us to deliver differentiated services to our clients.
WS-I represents a vendor agnostic forum to champion our needs,
and we're excited to be a member," said John McKinley, executive
vice president and chief technology officer of Merrill Lynch.
[Source: Internetnews.com] |
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Web
Services: A Game for Big Players. "Only big EAI players
can expect to survive the web services revolution according to
UK research firm Butler Group - but the other vendors have a stay
of execution as web services are not fully formed as yet." [Source:
CRM-Forum News.] |
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Writing
a Book Is a Lot Like Writing a Computer Program. Graham
Glass, chairman and chief architect of The Mind
Electric, and author of Web
Services: Building Blocks for Distributed Systems and
other titles, shares his book-writing methodology. "I hope this
information was useful to someone!" Yes, it was, Graham. I'm just
not as fast, at least not on book #2, Loosely Coupled--The
Missing Pieces of Web Services. |
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IBM Partners Launch On-Demand Services. "The company said Friday that on-demand applications for human resources, accounting and marketing are now available from HRSmart, Intacct and Onyx." Is this really "computing on demand," or just the old ASP model in a new paint job? [Source: news.com]
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Web Hosting Strategies
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Share
the Pain. In my latests column for The Web Host Industry
Review, I explain why it's often a better strategy to use
you web-hosting vendor's shared resrouces instead of operating
your own servers, storage systems, routers, load balancers, backup/recovery
systems, and DNS and SMTP servers. |
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A
CIO's Guide to Managing Security Risk in Web Hosting Contracts:
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Web
Hosting 101. Here's a heavily edited phone interview I
did with a reporter for HostingTech magazine. It's a little strange,
don't you think? The first editor wanted to keep all the speech
and vocabulary peculiarities, "to retain the sense of a live interview."
But when it was edited a second time, another set of sentences
were yanked out, leaving the whole thing sort of flat. And as
my wife pointed out, I didn't really jump from drama and filmmaking
to web hosting. I spent 26 years in IT in between. |
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My
Book--A Classic! Imran Hameed writes on About.com, "Based
on Doug Kaye's classic book titled Strategies
for Web Hosting and Managed Services,following key points
are intended to create user interest in effectively managing relationship
with their MSPs and hosting service providers." Developing
Service Level Agreements for Outsourced Processes and Systems
(PDF). My book is also quoted as a source for this paper
Piotr Szymczyk delivered at the Carpathian Control Conference
in the Czech Republic. |
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Doug's Appearances
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Building
a Web Services Foundation: Web Services Strategies for IT Managers This session will drill down on the business and technical reasons that are driving leading companies around the world to move away from a vendor-specific legacy infrastructure and embrace a standards-based Web Services architecture. National studies of top IT managers indicate that when it comes to assessing potential roadblocks to adopting Web Services, bandwidth concerns are second only to security-related misgivings. This session will provide the tools for accurately modeling the impact that moving to a Web Services solution will have on your existing infrastructure. Armed with this knowledge, you'll be ready to formulate a strategic approach to developing and managing infrastructure resources that can successfully support a scalable and dependable Web Services framework. |
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The IT Strategy Letter is published weekly by Doug Kaye. The content is identical to Doug's weblogs.
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