Liudvikas Bukys

Don Park:
Workflow business evaporating?
“IBM announced that it will bundle
BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS-based web service workflow engine, with Websphere. If workflow becomes just another weapon in the application server feature war, what will happen to the workflow business?”

Lots of good stuff related to digital identity management can be found at the
weblog of Andre Durand.

CORBA vs SOAP rant on Advogato. “ SOAP is an interesting technology for document exchange, but it’s role in enterprise computing is highly, highly, highly overrated, and CORBA is a wonderful jewel that so many people overlook out of fear. But really, it’s not that complicated.”

Jakob Nielsen: 10 Best Intranets of 2002:
Notable points:

• “In terms of management structure, the only trend we found was that there was no clear picture of who winning intranet teams report to within the organizations. The two most common organizational homes for the intranet teams were information technology departments and human resources (HR) departments, but we also found good intranet teams reporting to the corporate secretary and the corporate communications department.”
• “Much of the value of an intranet comes from making it a communications tool that all employees check every day. This can be a challenge, especially if the old intranet was universally hated for being clumsy and impossible to work with, as was the case in some of the companies.”
• “The one-stop shopping approach extended to the security features for most of the winning intranets. Single sign-on is finally becoming a reality on many good intranets, following years of persistent user requests.”
• “The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments.
  Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.”

and you can buy a
158-page report on the annual competition, including 104 screenshots of the 10 winners.

Schoon, Rees, Jezierski (Microsoft):
Designing Application-Managed Authorization

IDC on
IBM: Business Transformation Through End-to-End Integration

Threads Considered Harmful. A little known anecdote is that after Dijkstra’s famous paper in “Communications of the ACM” titled “Goto Considered Harmful”, and after the reactions, the ACM has adopted a policy of not allowing papers with “… Considered Harmful” in the title. It seems it decided such papers are inherently inciting. Thus, Goto has a position of sole infamy in the history of the ACM. Nonetheless, if ever a feature has been easy to compare to Goto in its destructiveness, threads would be that feature. Threads are, in a sense, “the goto that keeps on giving”: once you have spawned a thread, there is no way to know anymore which line is being executed in parallel with yours — at least not with a lot of careful locking that a moment’s neglectfulness proves useless. When deciding to spawn a thread, you are conciously giving up any and all protection your language gives you from making stupid mistakes. The rest of the paper will try to convince you that while there is a limited class of problems for which threads are a good solution, your problem is almost certainly not among them — no matter what your problem is. [kuro5hin.org]

See also: links to similarly-provocative

presentation by John Ousterhout
and

message by Tom Christiansen.

Four Simultaneous Access Points OK for 802.11b [Slashdot]

MSS Initiative Makes Progress
Phil writes
“The MSS Initiative was started by Richard van den Berg and myself to combat sites that are broken (enable Path MTU Discovery AND block ICMP 3,4) which include such big sites as SecurityFocus and CERT (causing those behind PPPoE and other less-than-1500-MTU-protocols to be unable to view the sites). This past week we were priveleged enough to be able to present a paper at the 16th LISA Systems Administration Conference! Check out the paper and slides and be sure, like many members of the audience, to fix the sites you administer!”
[Slashdot]

Slashdot: Members of the Oasis interoperability consortium approved the

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)
on Wednesday as an OASIS open standard. The move paves the way for the XML-based framework to enable secure SSO (single sign-on) and other security functions for Web services transactions spanning multiple hosted sites.