John Sequeira

Amped::Technology

Tuesday, October 05, 2004
The SOAP/WS* Debate: Raymond Chen 0, MSDN 1

"If you don't understand all the specs, don't worry about it. Tools are being created by people everywhere to make it so you can just indicate the capabilities you need, and the rest will be done for you," said Matt Powell, a content strategist at Microsoft's developer network, in a posting.

I take this as encouragement to use technologies that you don't understand, and I, um, don't understand that. I just can't think of a more common reason for projects failing.

If you go to the source of this quote, you'll see an interesting discussion at the bottom. Joel's spot-on criticisms are alluded to in the "Leaky Abstractions" comment, and I thought the whole discussion exuded a major "Raymond Chen vs. MSDN" vibe.

People are finally (slowly, very slowly) figuring out that using SOAP for departmental apps just because Visual Studio makes it easy might not be the best idea. Is this any different than the Java folks figuring out that EJB might not be the best technology to build non-distributed systems (aka standard LAMP-like web applications)?
10:54:31 AM      comment []  trackback []

Distributed Version Control

From the svk ChangeLog:

svk now runs natively on win32. [Autrijus]

Very nice. Try it out if you need to add distributed merges onto Subversion.

I thought that svk might be a road for my own version requirements, but having read some pretty thoughtful endorsements of darcs from David Wheeler, Martin Poole, and Matt Sargeant, I think I'll check that out first. It seems to bridge the worlds of distributed and single-developer version control pretty nicely, and has been cross platform for a while.

Update: It seems Autrijus, responsible for PAR-ifying SVK, is looking to add some darcs goodness into it.
9:39:59 AM      comment []  trackback []


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