The joy of watching the old Mission: Impossible TV shows was in following the team of super secret agents as they laid a trap for the bad guy. The evil one inevitably succumbed to the lure set by the heroes through his greed or hubris, usually the latter.
British Columbia's Ministry of Attorney General has a database with secret witness information. DaimlerChrysler Services North America runs business applications with sensitive dealer and partner data in them. Lydian Trust holds private financial information about its wealthy clients in its data files.
The surly Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once observed, "It's just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less." He must have been thinking about mass storage systems.
At its TechEd '03 conference Tuesday, SAP launched a new online collaborative environment for developers and demonstrated an unreleased tool to help nontechnical users model applications and generate the Java code to create them. But attendees here said they worried that the tool, code-named GUI Machine, might lead to underperforming applications and cause compatibility problems with existing programs.
Microsoft dramatically improves security . . . . . . on its sprawling campus headquarters by no longer distributing maps to visitors "for security reasons," according to a harried PR person telling lost and bewildered journalists how to navigate the large network of seemingly randomly numbered buildings.
Open source spells doom for Oracle, DB2 . . . Sybase and other general-purpose databases, predicts Tim O’Reilly. “MySQL might do to databases what Apache did for Web serving,” says the president of technical book publisher and conference organiser O’Reilly & Associates. Apache, he claims, has forced Microsoft to make its IIS Web server software “effectively free in bundles”. David Axmark, co-founder and “open sorcerer” at MySQL, the developers of the open-source database, cautions that you won’t see Larry Ellison approving free deals for Oracle9i in the near future, if ever. Still, he says, “MySQL has already forced prices down in databases.” And the price pressure will pick up steam with the release of MySQL Enterprise in two years.
... strategy, saying, "IBM has been using Linus [Torvalds] like a tool and exploiting the open-source community." Those fightin' words come from Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president for Sun's software group. He doesn't think IBM's Linux sales have been kind to CIOs, either. "They've been spreading IP [intellectual property] radiation" to companies that get their Linux from IBM because of Big Blue's contract problems with SCO Group. Sun, he hastened to add, has crossed all its t's and dotted all its i's with SCO just in case the Unix/Linux legal claims have merit.
Web services aren’t sliced bread, nor are they the best things since. They’re just sharper knives in your IT kitchen. And as with sharp knives, you have to be careful not to hurt yourself with them. Web services give you a higher level of abstraction than an application server or middleware, such as Corba. That abstraction makes it easier for software developers to program relationships among disparate systems, because Web services offer a broader (but far from complete, mind you) set of standards.
Web services aren't sliced bread, nor are they the best things since. They're just sharper knives in your IT kitchen. And as with sharp knives, you have to be careful not to hurt yourself with them. Web services give you a higher level of abstraction than an application server or middleware, such as CORBA. That abstraction makes it easier for software developers to program relationships among disparate systems, because Web services offer a broader (but far from complete, mind you) set of standards.
Sun Apple ignite new desktop skirmish... with Microsoft. While it’s doubtful that either company will be able to unseat Windows’ monopoly status in the PC market, you’ve got to admire their pluck. Sun Microsystems’ attack on Microsoft’s desktop fortress is called Project Mad Hatter and uses Linux combined with StarOffice and other open-source goodies.
Web services remain behind firewall . . . . . and probably will stay there for the next year or longer. Or so say vendors and developers who work in the field. Everything from immature standards to security concerns seems to be holding Web services in check, they say. "It's an immature field, and the standards are still evolving," observes James Franklin, director at Extreme Logic. He says only 10 percent to 20 percent of the clients of his 200-person IT consultancy are dipping their toes into Web services, and they're doing so only for internal integration work.
Security tzar slams feature frenzy . . . . . . at the expense of "the science behind security." Yes, Ed Reed's Novell business card really does read "security tzar." He thinks the industry is three to five years away from delivering systems that are truly secure, especially for B2B Internet operations.
IPsec, SSL vendors may fumble security . . . . . . opportunities in the emerging Web services world, where applications will be protected higher in the software stack, according to Bob Blakely, chief scientist for privacy and security at IBM Corp.'s Tivoli Software unit. Both IPsec and SSL, he says, don't use "intuition" like people do in protecting systems.
Commerce One clings to Web services . . . . . . for a technology life raft while the company morphs along with e-business. Narry Singh, the newly ensconced senior vice president of marketing at Commerce One Operations Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif., recounts the various -- some might say muddled -- past lives of the company and admits somewhat ruefully that, again, "our current era is one of reinvention." A big part of the change inside and outside the company, he says, is a shift to Web services. Still, Singh doubts that offering a 100 percent Java Web services technology gives Commerce One an advantage in the market.
Major Retailers Wary of Leap to Web Services . . .until those services prove themselves over a long period of time. "If the early bird gets the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese," drawled Jimmy Hale, vice president of Web technology at Neiman Marcus in Dallas. He said this is one area where he won't be an early adopter. Dave Towers, vice president of e-commerce operations for New York-based J. Crew, nodded in agreement, adding, "We've looked at Web services. There's nothing out there for us."