Crossroads News April 2003 issue is about Agile Development and SCM.
This month the Crossroads News writers discuss the issues surrounding SCM for agile development projects and how to make SCM itself be more agile. We also welcome author and SCM evangelist Brad Appleton as our newest Contributing Editor with his regular column Agile SCM.
I'd like to welcome QDox, the Quick JavaDoc Scanner project to codehaus.
QDox is a high speed, small footprint parser for extracting class/interface/method definitions from source files complete with JavaDoc @tags. It is designed to be used by active code generators or documentation tools.
[Xpath-ng] Revival/XPath NG "sprint" at XML Europe? by Uche Ogbuji attempts to relight the fire under XPath-NG. I was recently discussing the fall-off of the work with some folks at SD-West, so I'm glad to see some momentum possibly increase.
I'd rather not see this effort go gently into that good night. XQuery and cousins will be REC pretty soon, and I still strongly think the world needs an alternative. Basically, I think all we need to provide something people can latch on to is a refinement of my original straw man to take into account all the discussion that followed, and putting together a couple of foundational modules. I think if we were able to get together for a few hours at XML Europe, we could probably get most of the former done, and start useful discussion of the latter. I know that a decent number of the folks here will be at XML Europe, so what do you think of the idea?
I've been thinking today, as I search for income-producing work. I know what kinds of problems I enjoy working on, and they tend to be computational problems. I don't find excitement in typical data-management problems whose main concern is the collection, storage and display of data.
Take Amazon, for example. The whole e-commerce process is just data management. The cool part of amazon is the suggestions it makes for you. That's computations. Likewise, bioinformatics, resource optimization, cryptanalysis and web indexing/searching represent way cool problem domains to me.
It seems to me that it's in the computation that real value can be added to a system. There are a bazilliion systems that can collect an e-commerce order, all of about roughly the same feature set. The "you might also be interested in..." feature is the value-add which might help you sell more books. Tracking trucks isn't difficult, but routing them efficiently can directly affect the bottom-line.
Reading the trade press, folks seem to be questioning the value of IT investments. I have a feeling it's because they aren't creating IT projects that actually add value. Replacing a PHP order-entry system with a Java order-entry system of pretty much the same core features, maybe with a more modern architecture or language just doesn't seem to make much sense to the bottom line.
It's like replacing the carpet in a bricks'n'mortar bookstore.
So, I think I'm arguing (and certainly self-servingly) is that organizations should keep their existing data management applications, even if in PHP, and find ways to fund value-add projects. The promise of XML is that these heterogeneous systems can interface. We've taught to fear stovepipe systems, but we can just relabel them as best of breed and focus on adding to systems, instead of whole-sale replacement. You need to find the computational aspects of your business and target them. That's where you'll differentiate yourself and affect the bottom-line.
Of course, folks who know me probably find this ironic, as I'm a chronic re-implementor.
OASIS to get BPEL4WS jurisdiction, so I think that means they have completely trumped BPML, if there was any doubt.
One issue, whether the specification would be submitted royalty-free, apparently has been resolved, as all submitters have agreed to not seek royalties, or financial compensation, for their contributions to the specification used in any implementations, according to the source.IBM and BEA have previously agreed to not seek royalties, but Microsoft had not made such a vow.
Wow, there's a European Business Rules Conference in June 2003, but alas, I won't be going. Someone want to fly me to Zurich? I'll buy you a beer.
A Quick Introduction to OWL Web Ontology Language by Roger Costello and David Jacobs presents a pretty clear picture of why we should care about ontologies.
I've personally struggled with OWL for a while since Danny Ayers (rawblog, semantic blog) planted the idea in my head of mixing drools with OWL.
Database Heavyweights Weigh In on XML Standard along with other articles and conversations I've had makes it seem like XQuery is starting to heat up as an important (or at least hyped) technology.
Does anyone else care about XQuery. Does anyone want to see a jaxen-esque XQuery engine?
Java(TM) 2 SDK, Standard Edition, v 1.4.2 (J2SE(TM)) is available now.
