Todd Fast's Blog

Implementing ebXML's Reg/Rep

The following article, Implementing the ebXML Registry/Repository by Chaemee Kim, gives a decent overview of the ebXML Reg/Rep initiative by OASIS and its relationship to UDDI. Sun has been working on an open source implementation of Reg/Rep called ebxmlrr, part of the freebxml.org project.

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Posted at 09:56AM Dec 17, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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Get a Free TiVo!

I saw this great news on Alan Coopersmith's blog: TiVo is giving away free TiVo's to frustrated Comcast customers on Friday, December 17th. Actually, it's a charity event and a way to tweak Comcast's nose at the same time.

I've had TiVo for nearly 5 years now and I can't express how much I enjoy it. I even did an interview for Tech TV as a loyal TiVo customer a couple of years ago (no, don't ask for the tape <g>). If you don't have TiVo yet and you subscribe to Comcast cable in the Bay Area, you should absoultely, positively take advantage of this.

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Posted at 05:25AM Dec 16, 2004 by Todd Fast in General  | 
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Fun With Functoids

If you want to learn more about functoids in general, see this paper by Brian McNamara and Yannis Smaragdakis entitled Functional Programming in C++. There is also this nice FC++ tutorial that is a bit easier to read. For the functional programmers out there (don't look at me--I'm not one), much can be summarized by stating that functoids correspond to closures. For the imperitive programmers out there, we'll define what a closure is some other day. <g> Actually, it's pretty easy to describe functoids for imperitive programmers as well: they are objects that enclose, or represent, functions. Konstantin Laufer has a very nice overview for functoids in C++ in his paper A Framework for Higher-Order Functions in C++.

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Posted at 07:15PM Dec 14, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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Custom Functoids in BizTalk

Here is an interesting blog entry that describes building a custom functoid in Microsoft BizTalk 2004. Data mapping is a key part of an enterprise Web services toolset, and this is some nice insight into Microsoft's approach.

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Posted at 06:10PM Dec 14, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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Java Studio Enterprise 7 just released!

Java Studio Enterprise 7 has just been released! Please visit the JSE 7 product page for full information. This release is a major improvement to the Java Studio product, and includes extensive UML support that rivals standalone UML modeling tools, developer collaboration to help you productively work with other developers remotely, a completely modernized look-and-feel, and many other improvements.

For $995, you get both Java Studio Enterprise 7 and Java Studio Creator along with a year of monthly updates, including preview versions of future releases, via Sun's Java Studio Developer subscription. Or, if you want to buy 6 or more licenses, you can get them for $5 bucks per employee with a 1000 employee minimum. That means any number of licenses between 6 and 1000 only costs you $5000!

Please also visit the developer portal for all Sun's Java tools, include Java Studio Enterprise and Java Studio Creator.

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Posted at 04:25PM Dec 13, 2004 by Todd Fast in NetBeans  | 
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Custom Datatypes in RELAX NG Using Java

Another RELAX NG goodie written by the XML Bible geek, Elliotte Rusty Harold: RELAX NG with custom datatype libraries: Define new types with Java technology.

To give you an idea of what this article is about, several RELAX NG schema validators (like Sun's Multischema Validator, or MSV) let you plug in custom datatype validation using simple Java constructs. This capability can be used to go (way) beyond traditional document validation, even to the extent of verifying that a piece of XML data fulfills requirements above and beyond its syntax. For example, it would be possible to verify that a document contains a valid credit card number (and maybe even post a fund reserve) with an online clearinghouse during the validation phase, rather then relying on the application layer to do this sort of validation at a later stage. Such semantic validation is extraordinarily powerful.

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Posted at 07:41PM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Software  | 
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RELAX NG Tutorial

If you're fed up with the complexity of XML Schema (and who isn't), IBM hosts a terrific tutorial on RELAX NG ("relaxing"), a sane and easy-to-use alternative XML schema language. Also check out the other XML tutorials hosted at IBM. The only downside: IBM requires free registration to view them.

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Posted at 06:44PM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  |  Comments[1]
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Creating Project Types in NetBeans 4

For those of you wondering how to create new project types in NetBeans 4.x, check out Jesse Glick's excellent article, NetBeans 4.0 Project & Build System How-To. For detailed architecture info on the NetBeans 4 fully Ant-based project/build system, check out the build system design docs.

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Posted at 05:45PM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in NetBeans  | 
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Dynamic Delegation in Java

This O'Reilly article, Dynamic Delegation and Its Applications, discusses dynamic interception of method invocations for concrete Java types using code from the Dunamis Project. This is a sorely lacking feature of the JDK, and quite useful, especially for use in lightweight containers or enterprise frameworks.

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Posted at 05:40PM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Software  | 
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JSR for WS-Addressing

Eduardo Pelegri-Lopart mentions on his blog that JSR-261 has now been filed, with the goal of creating a Java API for WS-Addressing. This is great news and will be a key part of Sun's Project Kittyhawk and overall SOA initiatives. It's also a long way from where we were a year ago, struggling with restrictive licensing terms from the IP owners.

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Posted at 05:20PM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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Screenshots of Developer Collaboration in Java Studio Enterprise 7

As the developer collaboration architect for the forthcoming Java Studio Enterprise 7 (aka JSE 7) release, I thought I would post some screenshots here to give everyone a look at these cool, new, cutting-edge features. Enjoy!

JSE 7 showing the collaboration login panel	JSE 7 showing the collaboration session list and a presence notification
A new conversation between Todd (me) and Sheryl Su, one of the other collaboration team members	Developer-friendly chat showing syntax coloring and code completion in the chat window
Developer-friendly chat showing syntax coloring and line numbering in the chat transcript	A shared file in the conversation's file sharing channel
Sheryl remotely editing the shared file; note the guarded region in my copy	Todd and Sheryl editing the shared file simultaneously; note both guarded regions

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Posted at 05:46AM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in NetBeans  |  Comments[2]
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Fast Web Services

Those of you concerned about the performance of Web services due to the overhead of XML parsing, check out this article describing Sun's Fast Web Services effort. According to the article, simple benchmarks of Fast showed it is about 4 to 10 times faster than XML literal encoding, and comparable in speed to binary protocols like RMI and RMI/IIOP.

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Posted at 01:47AM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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BPXL: BPMI.org's plan to expand BPEL

BPMI.org has announced that they intend to extend BPEL with what they call Business Process eXtension Layers, or BPXL.

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Posted at 01:12AM Dec 03, 2004 by Todd Fast in Web  | 
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