Michael A. Sick

Have you ever looked at a child's toy and thought, "I wish they had that when I was growing up?" I had that familiar feeling while reading Web Services: Building Blocks for Distributed Systems by Graham Glass. Having pored over various specifications, articles, and newsgroup archives over the past year, Web Services is the type of book that I wish I had when I first approached the topic. The book will be a help to developers, architects, and technical managers that want to become acquainted with Web services. The book starts with a short, short history of computing and a brief summary of Web services. The reader is quickly introduced to the basic concepts and technologies of Web services, including SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. One of the best features of the book is that concep... (more)

Nothing Lost in the Translation

Martin Fowler, of Extreme Programming fame, states: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." While true for every programmer in the business, this maxim also applies to code generators and translators. In this installment of "Web Services @ Work," we interview Federico Zoufaly, CTO and cofounder of ArtinSoft. His c... (more)

Grids, Peers, Discovery, and What's a GAIA?

This month WSJ focuses on P2P architectures and grid computing, two topics that are gaining momentum in our industry. Over the past year or so I've read many excellent articles and books on these topics. However, getting a handle on what P2P and the grid are can be a challenge as implementations advance rapidly, major technologies are converging, and more people are applying these concep... (more)

An Overview Of The Java WSDP 1.5

It can be difficult for developers, architects, and managers to keep up with new software packages and releases. This can be especially true with fast moving technologies like Web services. This article provides an overview of the main technologies that comprise the Java Web Services Developer Pack (Java WSDP). For more in-depth knowledge of the WSDP, simply download it and walk through ... (more)

Service Discovery: Perspectives on the Past, Present, & Future

Service discovery and identification is a critical piece of the overall Web services puzzle. Existing service architectures, such as CORBA, JINI, and ebXML, have all devoted significant effort towards making service discovery available and comprehensive. If Web services is to become a ubiquitous platform for service oriented computing, then the industry will need to create standards and ... (more)