It seems that sometimes gradual changes can have a huge sociological impact. T-shirts have been around for some time now; they started becoming popular during WWI. As time and technology have progressed, t-shirts have become cheaper than the equivalent shirts. It’s now possible to buy t-shirts from a vast array of suppliers with logos, pictures, sayings, and other types of content (to borrow a Web word) pre-printed on them. Moreover, it’s become simple to order t-shirts with your own content printed on them for a reasonable price.

This month’s BCS ‘iT NOW’ magazine contains a short anonymous article entitled The problem with SOAs. It does a reasonable job of explaining what an SOA is at a high level, but I thought it might be worthwhile briefly discussing it in the context of WebSphere ESB. As with many discussions of SOA, the majority of the article is spent discussing Web Services as the invocation mechanism for SOAs. At the end it mentions JMS as a possible alternative invocation method, but says ‘implementation may be problematic’ (although doesn’t really explain why).

It appears that Orange, in their infinite wisdom, decided that they were better than Nokia at creating a usable phone, and are in the habit of replacing the standby (home) screen on their some of their smartphones with a custom Orange one. It’s actually pretty awful, as it’s unreadable, doesn’t always update correctly, and doesn’t show some useful information such as the current profile. Orange were too arrogant to admit this at first, although in their defence it looks like there will be a way to disable it on future models. I have a Nokia 6630 and this has annoyed me for some time - I also have a suspicion it has contributed to many of the crashes I seem to encounter with the phone. Fortunately someone has written a small application called HSKiller to kill this homescreen and bring back the default (the page is in French - the download link is right at the top). It has a few minor niggles, but seems to be working relatively well so far for me.

Why oh why can’t someone make a wallet that:

• Can hold at least ten plastic cards, some cash, and some receipts so they are easily accessible?

• Isn’t so huge that it looks like I’m carrying a copy of War and Peace in my pocket?

• Looks fairly smart, preferably made from leather, but not like I just bought it from Armani or some other o-so-faishonable label?

• Lasts more than 2 weeks?

• And most importantly, has a zip all the way round so your stuff doesn’t fall out?

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Cote’ posted an article recently discussing the possible death of J2EE (Andy Piper, another blogger from here in Hursley, has noticed this too). It’s pretty hard to assess the likelihood of that happening, and I’m not sure I’m in a position to comment. However, it’s probably truthful to say that J2EE is a complex platform to get to grips with. In a sense, J2EE, although a standard and a platform, has always really been Java plus some other stuff (EJBs, Web Services, Servlets, JDBC, JMS, etc.) rather than a single entity. This means you really need to be able to claim an understanding of all of these to fully ‘get’ J2EE.

So let’s imagine you’ve sent a document out to a bunch of people for their review and comments, and you’re currently going through the process of updating it with their corrections, clarification requests, and so on. How do you know when the document’s done? Well, how long is a piece of string?

I’d propose the following rule of thumb:

Take the number of valid review comments you receive from a particular person, and call that a. Take the number of times you recieve comments that require you to point someone at a part of the document they’ve missed (let’s assume it is well organised), and call that _b. _ Divide a by b - this is the review quotient.

The Breakfast Club is an easy-to-watch movie about five teenagers in detention. It’s definitely a teen flick, and most of the more serious friendship-building scenes are clearly aimed squarely at this age bracket. Having said that, the (partly) slapstick comedy appealed to me, although I think it’s probably necessary to be in a mood for something a bit silly.

The only poorly drawn character in this film is Mr. Vernon, the school principal, who reacts inconsistently and is hard to follow. The students all fit into clear stereotypes at the start, but unsurprisingly move out of these molds as the film progresses. I was expecting good things of Emilio Estevez, and indeed he delivered, but Judd Nelson provides a standout performance as probably the hardest character to play: the rebel, who, despite some softening, stays a rebel to the end.

WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) is IBM’s development tool for constructing SCA modules that can be deployed to WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server. It is built on top of Rational Application Developer (RAD), which is in turn Eclipse-based, so it inherits a lot of functionality, including support for Java, J2EE, UML, etc. However, it also provides the ability to develop:

• ESB SCA-based mediation modules, which can contain ESB mediation flows (and Java components).

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After my previous post about mediation in ESB, I should add that there is a third way to modify messages on the bus, that doesn’t go by the name of ‘mediation’: using a JAX-RPC handler. It’s only suitable for SOAP messages (which can be transported over HTTP or JMS), but is otherwise most similar to Platform Messaging mediations. The primary advantage of JAX-RPC handlers is that they are conformant to a JSR specification, but they aren’t able to do a number of things that mediations can, such as modify the target of a SOAP request.

In a previous post describing SCA in WebSphere ESB / Process Server, I wrote that SCA modules have to be running in the same address space. I’d like to correct this: the restriction actually imposed on these bindings is that they need to be between SCA modules running in the same WebSphere cell (see this post for more information on cells, nodes, and servers). This is because the SCA resources that are automatically created when an SCA module is deployed are cell-scoped. Different types of SCA resources are created depending on whether asynchronous or synchronous behaviour is required, which is normally decided automatically, but in both cases the scope is the same. For more information, see this Developerworks article.