This week we have a couple of blog posts from Richard Seroter, author of the excellent “SOA Patterns with BizTalk 2009″ book. I need to finish up a couple of my longer form posts before this blog devolves into a group of links.
BizTalk
Not much of interest happened in the distributed computing space this past week. Instead, here is a link to a blog post comparing agile self-organizing teams to lean leadership .
Agile/Lean Development
This week sports a new name for these posts, and a link to a contract toolkit from Microsoft R&D. It kind of reminds me of the explicit precondition/post-condition declarations in Eiffel.
WF
Contract-First Development
REST
* Courtesy of Sam Gentile
* Courtest of Stefan Tilkov
The big news for this week is the release of the Enterprise Service Bus Toolkit 2.0. The best part of this release is the ESB Toolkit has moved from being a Codeplex project to a fully-supported Microsoft product offering.
I want to like KDE 4, I really do. I have been running a KDE desktop since version 2.1. I loved the changes that came in version 3.x. Most of my favorite Linux applications are KDE-based. The numerous bugs and instability in KDE 4 have finally taken their toll.
The final straw was the all to frequent crashes that locked up the keyboard and mouse. Nothing ruins your work day like having your computer hard lock two or three times while in the middle of writing code. Add to that random bugs and glitches in various Plasma widgets and broken printing support in Okular and you have a desktop that is basically unusable. On a side note, I am also dismayed by the direction that the Amarok project has taken. Version 1.3 was the finest audio player on any platform. For version 2.x, the Amarok team has apparently decided to toss out most of the features that made 1.3 totally awesome and replace them with a stripped-down feature set and a confusing user interface. I do not understand why they decided to make that change.
Rather than continue to suffer, I have decided to switch back to Xfce. I still dislike GNOME, so I do not see that as an option. Though at the end of the day both are based on GTK+, so I will most likely end up using more than a few GNOME applications. In fact, since Firefox and OpenOffice.org are both GTK+-based and are applications I use every day, Xfce may be a better fit for the way I work. Now I just have to find GTK+ replacements for some of my existing KDE applications. KDE 4.3 is slated for release at the end of July, but I do not think I am going to bother to check it out. Maybe after a couple more releases it will stabilize into something I can use.
Quite a few things have happened in the integration space with Microsoft recently. A new CTP of Oslo has been released, the BizTalk Enterprise Service Bus guidance is on its way to being a supported product and there is even a new version of the Managed Services Engine to play with.
Sam Gentile has posted the sixth part in his Enterprise Service Bus series. This installment covers ESB channel models.
I have had enough and I am not going to take it anymore. I am tired of spending hours and hours fighting with the visual mapping tool only to discover that no combination of links and functoids will create the mapping output I need. Instead of using the visual mapper, I will instead be creating all of my BizTalk maps using XSLT scripts. What has taken hours to get working using the visual mapper can be built in a fraction of the time by writing a script. In many cases there is no way to get the visual mapper to handle complicated looping and the only option is using a custom XSLT script. The past few weeks I have been scripting out more and more of my maps and each time I kick myself for not pursuing this technique sooner.
The only downside to this technique is that it requires somebody fluent in XSLT and functional programming to create and maintain the maps. This pretty much eliminates the possibility of having a non-developer maintaining maps. As a consultant, it means I have to be sure to perform the necessary knowledge transfer to a client resource so that they can continue to maintain their maps after I have moved on to a new assignment. I think I can live with that.
If you are tired of fighting with the visual mapper I highly suggest you look into creating maps using custom XSLT scripts. Once you get used to it, I guarantee you will not want to go back to using clunky visual interface ever again.
The fifth part in the series on Amazon web services has been posted on the IBM developerWorks site. This one covers the use of Amazon’s SimpleDB service.
IBM DeveloperWorks has a series of articles all about Amazon’s web service offerings. Each article covers one particular service, and includes information on pricing, usage and code samples.
Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Storage in the cloud with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Part 3: Servers on demand with EC2
Part 4: Reliable messaging with SQS
Part 5: Dataset processing in the cloud with SimpleDB
Updated: Added a link to the fifth part in this series.
