106Miles Blog: March meeting full up

Bummer I was interested in seeing what this was all about: 106Miles Blog: March meeting full up. Maybe next time.

Leaning towards REST but.....

Living a little more in the real world these days, i.e. working at the application layer, solving customer problems I have had the chance to use Web Services (SOAP and REST) in various application senarios. From that I am leaning more towards REST style architectures because in the real world I inhabit it is unreasonable to expect all end points to have the latest technology and be able to navigate the complexities of SOAP.

The biggest problem I see with the WS-*%$#? mess is that it is quickly becoming the next CORBA and is failing one of my simple heuristics, if a single reasonalbe talented engineer cannot pick up the concepts and start being productive in a week or so then there is an issue. In this case the S has been dropped from SOAP and we just have Object Access Protocol which is another way of saying RPC and leads back to CORBA. This version is better as it not tightly locked into a synchronous RPC view of the world but the complexity still exists and is growing.

On the other hand there are things I still like about the web services stack and are missing from REST. One is the degree of formalism in defining interfaces either RPC or document style interfaces. Last week I needed to access several web services and being able to query them for their WSDL was great and made my life a lot easier. Having to go through each one and look for the documentation (we all documented everything all the time right !) would have been a major pain. This is the subject of a good article by Hugh Winkler that Mark Baker pointed to. It makes a good case for have a formal interface description for REST.

So while I lean towards REST for simplicity, the ability to talk to any end point providing they have HTTP and XML the lack of a standard machine description is a big lack - I would almost be happy with a JavaDoc or NDoc type of tool but for REST to take over the Simple part of web services I think this is required

Retail becoming more tech centric

I attended an event hosted by Sun Microsystems last week around retail technology. A part of the program was a presentation from Jeff Roster from Gartner. A significant part of his talk was devoted to how the retail industry is moving from techno-phobic to techno-centric, and he had a lot of information to back it up. A major piece of data was showing how more IT centric retailers would tend to dominate in terms of market growth

While I agree with the essence of his presentation, and I have seen the same, I think it needs to be framed in terms of results rather than just bit and bytes. What is happening is that the smart retailers are starting to use technolgoy to give them accurate numbers to run their business. It has started with Walmart and the supply chain and it is now moving to the demand (shopper facing) side of the business. While IT is great the key in the Information not the Technology part of IT. Retailers who empower IT to deliver accurate information and that the business side can act on are the ones that will succeed.

Actionable information is a critical measure of success, there is no point in knowing that store abc is losing shoppers or average basket size is declining if there is no processes in place to act on the data. A part of any information project is ensuring that there are levers to pull and knows to turn to change the information that is measured.