Mes: octubre 2008

Self-organized people

As you may know, I ‘m teacher assistant at FIUBA. some weeks ago we asked the students to form groups. According to the number of students and teachers, we needed 6 groups of 8 members each. But…the students presented 7 groups, 3 of them with 8 members each, and other 4 groups of 6 members each. In a first attempt we try to dissolved one group and reorganized its members to have 3 groups, but after a while we decided to call the all the members of these 4 groups and we told them: «we have 3 groups of 8 members each and we can handle only 3 more groups, so we need you to form 3 groups as you like». Some minutes later the had solved the problem.

Agiles 2008 done!

After a long planning we did it. We are very pleased with the results;more than 400 people attended the conference coming from several countries like Brasil, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay, Colombia and Argentina; the quality of the presentations was excellent and all the schedule was followed during the whole conference. I want to thank the sponsors, speakers and the all the people that make conference possible.

I feel this conference will be the foundational milestone of the Latin American Agile Community.

If you are interested in being to part of the community, join our Yahoo! Group at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/laasd/

During the next few days the conference website will be updated with the material used.

Say no more!

What do we use Web Services for? (ws-part 2)

Well, lets’ start by making the distinction between what was the original idea and what is the people doing now.

Originally Web Services were thought to share information between applications. The applications can be develop in different technologies and can also belong to different companies. For two applications to be able to share information they must agreed two things: the format the information will be structured and the way (transport) the information will be sent/arrived.

This problem is not new. As you can imagine before the raised of Web Services there were some attempts to solve this problem (like EDI and CORBA) but none of them were successful (unless in terms of industry adoption).

Web Services result to be a good solution and the development tools started to provide very useful features to work with them. Then developers started to use Web Services for some other scenarios like communication between the presentation layer and the business layer. But in most cases these two layers belong to the same application and are developed with the same technology, so it could be better to use some other protocols (like REST, netTcp or RMI) to obtain a better performance.

WordPress through Live Writer

Believe it or not, I am writing this post using Live Writer. Yes Microsoft built a software that is capable to work/interact with services that directly compete with his own product (Live Spaces).

After moving my blog to WordPress, I was looking for a tool that allow me to write posts being offline. After reviewing several tools I read an article that mentioned that it was possible to use Live Writer to post on WordPress. I didn’t beleive it at once, so I had to check it myself. And you see, that article was rigth!.

Technigth: Programando en Babel

Yesterday I attended to this event organized by Microsoft at Buenos Aires offices’. It was very interesting, I get some useful tools not only for playing but also to be applied in real world projects. The three main topics were: F#, Boo and IronPython each of witch had its own sponsor (AJLopez, RodolfoF y Martín Salias respectively). After the talk we shared some snacks and beers as usual.

What do we mean when we say Web Services? (ws-part 1)

To some people this could be a very simple question today, but I think that there are still some confused people around. I remember one of the last projects I was involved, we were build an application that should exchange information with an external application, the technical person that spoke to us when we tried to connect both applications called web service to a simple ASP page that returned data in a raw string. Well this situations leads me to this post.

When we talk about web service we are referring to a technology stack that include HTTP and SOAP among others. A web service is a software component that can be accessed by sending SOAP messages following the rules defined in the corresponding WSDL document. For those that are not familiar with this terms here is a short glossary with some common terminology in the world of Web services:

  • SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol, it specifies how to create the messages, its parts, how each part should be used.
  • WSDL: Web Service Definition Language, it is just a XML document that describes how to interact with an specific web service. Every Web Service must have an associated WSDL. The only thing needed to consume a web service is its WSDL.
  • HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, it is the main transport protocol of Internet.
  • UDDI: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration, defines how to maintain a structure of directories to share information about web services.

Web Services series (introduction)

I have been working with web services for a long time, I have came across with many design and implementation issues and I have reviewed many web service applications. During the last years I have been asked the same kind questions several times, and that is why I have decided to write this series to write down all the answers to that questions. The posts I have in mind at this moment are:

  • What do we mean when we say «Web Services»?
  • What do we use Web Services for?
  • Please don´t use DataSets in your Web Services
  • Tools for Web Services developers

Well, this all for now and walcomen to this series, I hope you to enjoy it.