SOA-Expertenwissen erschienen...

ab heute (30. Mai 2007) gibt's fast 900 Seiten geballtes SOA-Expertenwissen
als Buch - herausgegeben von Stefan Tilkov und mir :-) verfasst von 50 namhaften (deutsch & internationalen!) SOA-Cracks...

Wir haben eine hoffentlich informative Website dazu aufgebaut (designed by Dirk Hesse).

Eine ausführliche Ankündigung mit vielen Download-Links hat Stefan geblogt.

Interested in Rule-Engines (and their performance)?

an interesting writeup on rule-engine performance, comparison between
MS-Biztalk-Rule-Engine, Drools and Jess.... plus a rather lengthy (and friendly!) comment thread.

One summary: one should really care about rules and their management (most engines don't provide much support here!), less about details of rule algorithms... Your business simply doesn't care about RETE or not, unless their rules are interpreted correctly.

Would be nice if more commercial rule-engine providers would publish comparable benchmarks... maybe one of you readers could wake them up!

SOAX: Leseproben online

Der dpunkt-Verlag hat zum Buch SOA-Expertenwissen nun einige
Leseproben online. Viel Spass beim Schmökern.

Übrigens ist auch die neue Version der Website zum Buch seit einigen Tagen live, nunmehr basierend auf Textpattern und einem ordentlichen Design.

IT-Trends, live und in Farbe

Wer mal einen kompletten Rundumschlag sämtlicher gerade aktueller Trends der IT erleben möchte, den lade ich herzlich auf meinen IT-Trends-Workshop in Wien ein (17. Juli und 19. Oktober 2007). Von Web 2.0, AJAX, Online-Communities, über die Neuheiten der Software-Entwicklung (Ruby/Groovy/Rails/Grails), über Governance, Rule-Management, REST, SEDA, SOA, WS-(Pseudo-)Standards und Virtualisierung zu Media-Trends und Semantic-Web.

Interessant für Software-Entwickler, Projektleiter und alle IT'ler, die mal wieder einen weiten Blick über den Tellerrand eigener Projekte riskieren möchten.

Weitere Infos gibt's beim Konferenzveranstalter (CON.ECT) als pdf.

Ever heard of Prolog? Go, learn it!

Prolog was the language I used for my diploma thesis, back in the wild 80's (last century, internet had not been invented). I coded nearly everything in Prolog, rule processors, expert systems, user-interfaces (a real nuisance in Prolog, believe me!) and a persistence engine... (yep: store things, back then you had to do it on your own). Great fun, unstable implementations on the first commercial Unix machines.

As a reminiscence to that "wild age" - Learn Prolog Now. Contains links to several implementations (too bad they omitted XGP, one of the fancy Mac versions).

Btw: Prolog is much more fun than the current WS-* debate...

Always wanted to ask about RegEx but never dared to?

Maybe start with "The absolute bare minimum every programmer should know about regular expressions" - a tutorial post by Mike Malone.

I found it while exploring (sub-)reddit.

What consitutes "Enterprise-Class-Software"

I always thought the term "Enterprise-Software" to be underdefined. On the Glassfish-Wiki I found a somewhat longish but precise definition, covering many non-functional attributes, e.g. multiuser, i18n, scalability, high availability, reliability and so on.

In short: Everything a proper software architect should have on his (clear) mind...
(and, allow some self-marketing, will never forget if supported by our arc42-template).

tool for uber-bloggers

Hey - want to sign your mail with your latest blog-posting? Then BlogSigs might be interesting for you. Adam Pash (of LifeHacker) blogged it.

Imho: useless. Better give away your feeds' URL :-)

A new form of Art... with steamed milk

You like Latte Macciato as much as I do?
Want to impress your wife, friend or business partner with your artistry? Then combine both and learn the art of making latte...
(via LifeHacker)

SecondLife again: I did not expect...

to find "Deutsche Post" in SecondLife. Found via Frank Egger:

"you can send a post card of your avatar’s face or some other theme via second life to a real world address. i don’t know if this is really useful, but it’s a quite cool idea"

.

For this direct teleport to "PostTower" you need to have SecondLife installed. Very well done, SL'ish, with many signposts to help visitors to get along, video tutorials and the like. DPAG must have invested loads of (real!) money...

Why Cell-Phone-Software is a Sandtrap...

Alex Krupp posted some arguments on cellphone software. He's right, imho.

A long time ago, I briefly thought about (co-)founding a mobile-phone-gaming-software geekshop, but dropped the idea (lucky me...).