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San Mehat On Web Services & .Net 220

Posted by Hemos from the looking-down-the-road dept.
A reader writes: "There's an interview with San Mehat in regards to .Net & Webservices. He has some interesting comments about what will work and what won't work, and where things are going." San is well known for his Netwinder work, as well as being a good DJ. And, in the interest of full disclosure, San does work for VA Software, the parent company of OSDN, as is DevChannel.
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San Mehat On Web Services & .Net More

San Mehat On Web Services & .Net

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  • Make .NET Open Source (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it would benefit Microsoft if they made the framework for .NET open source. The dedication and expertise of the Open Source developer community would greatly enhance the reputation of .NET, leading to wider global deployment.
    • Are you new?

      The term "microsoft" and "open source" are junxtapositions of each other in the same sentence. /eyeroll
      • "junxtaposition"? I had to look through dictionary.com and the word isn't even there.

        Please be nice to your fellow Slashdotters and keep your language a little simpler. If your idea has merit we'll appreciate it without the fancy words.

        Otherwise, you think you're being impressive when you're just being grandiloquent.

    • Re:Make .NET Open Source (Score:5, Informative)

      by RiverTonic ( 668897 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @02:42PM (#6070057) Homepage
      Mono is an open source implementation of .Net Development Framework.
      You can find it here [go-mono.com]
      • Yes. However...

        The current SCO brouhaha is adding new urgency to the question: "Is .NET subject to any patents, whether owned by MS or owned by someone else?" This has bothered me before, but I've never noticed it being addressed. And certainly not authoritatively.

        • Actually, yes. I'm not sure how comprehensive the patents are but I understand that they do cover important parts of .NET. On the other hand, MS has never, for all it's nasty tricks, used patents to stifle other projects, even OSS ones it really hates.
          • Oh, MS has never used patents to stifle other projects, even OSS ones it really hates?
            Well, given the chance THEY WILL!! I tell you what, they will do _anything_ they can to stifle competition. They will even have ppl sending BS to /.
            Yours
            • The fact is, they certainly could have, and haven't. That doesn't mean they won't. But, in the face of a fanatical hatred of Linux, and a dislike of OSS in general, a company famous for dirty tactics and cheap tricks has NOT used it's patent arsenal against Linux. Which I think is worth considering in the future.

              This certainly does not mean they won't use non-standard exceptions, blah blah blah, all the same crap with .NET. I rather hope they don't because it's a good framework with substantial advantages

      • Re:Make .NET Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)

        by alext ( 29323 )
        That rather depends on what your definition of is is.

        At the moment, there is no Windows Forms, Web Forms or ADO.NET for Mono. Whether MS will allow there to be in due course is a very interesting question.

        Personally, I shall be taking great care to ensure that this remains of academic interest only.
        • Actually, you may want to go check the Mono site. There are ASP.NET and ADO.NET implementations.
          • Well I think he meant stable winforms, ADO.net, ASP.net api's. It is progressing but its not here yet on Mono at the same level as Windows.

            Right now Mono is approaching beta quality but winforms is very alpha. It depends on GTK#, in which the GTK# section of the website has...." TODO port to Freebsd: any volunteers Solaris: Any volunteers?", etc. Hmmmm.

            I use FreeBSD so this is a major blow for now. I could run the linux version but I am going to wait for it to mature first.

            The original point was that th
            • Well I think he meant stable winforms, ADO.net, ASP.net api's. It is progressing but its not here yet on Mono at the same level as Windows.

              I never said it had Winforms. I said it had ASP.NET and ADO.NET. And that's all I said in direct rebuttal to the person who said they were non-existant.

              I also did not comment on MS world domination, the state of the ECMA standard, or Patent issues.
    • Rotor (C# compiler, jscript compiler, CLR VM, and some libraries) is available under a shared source license.

      This is a reference implementation for BSD, so it's not open source, but it is good for looking under the hood for some portions.

    • I think it would benefit Microsoft if they made the framework for .NET open source. The dedication and expertise of the Open Source developer community would greatly enhance the reputation of .NET, leading to wider global deployment.
      You have absolutely no concept of what the rest of the world (non open source groupies) think do you?

  • Quite Nice (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .NET isn't that bad and VS.NET isn't that bad. That being said...I'd rather not use VS.NET. I've never been comfortable with it to be honest. ASP.NET has made my web stuff so much easier it isn't even funny. I used to be doing PHP stuff and then tried ASP 3.0. I never really liked either of them...I'm kind of excited to see where this stuff goes. And as for the post on VS.NET being buggy...it's not.

  • He seems to be confused as to what SOAP is (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, 2003 @02:45PM (#6070093)
    SOAP has several parts and he seems to be confusing them. Most all of the major vendors are using Schema (another W3 standard) for types and SOAP for enveloping but not encoding.

    SOAP encoding is recognized as incompatible and limiting which is why .Net does not use it by default but rather uses SOAP enveloping with Literal encoding.

  • Sorry state of affairs (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For years all the webservices buzzwords were going to save the world. If San's article is correct, we still have a long ways to go. Developers still worrying over serialization and passing complex objects as arrays of arrays of name-value pairs. Yuck
  • Did anyone else first see this as "Sun Redhat On Web Services & .Net" ?

  • SOAP doesn't do much, but watch it scale (Score:5, Informative)

    by c64cryptoboy ( 310001 ) * on Thursday May 29, 2003 @02:54PM (#6070171) Homepage Journal
    Then there's SOAP. SOAP allows you to do a lot, but also gives you just enough rope to hang yourself. The W3C guys have generated a very, very primitive transport. You get primitive data types: ints, bools, strings, arrays, arrays of arrays. That's about it. As a result, different implementations of SOAP are not always compatible. For example, there was a problem with datestamps. Some SOAP implementations did them one way, some did them another way.

    While Mr. Mehat states this as a criticism, I going to come out saying that this is a strength. SOAP is very light weight considering its alternatives. In-so-far as you can serialize objects to W3C Schema primitive types, you can avoid the difficulties of complex marshaling one incurs with other distribute service mechanisms (the stubs/skeletons of CORBA, etc.). The W3C Schema types are a quick and easy standard that are independent of choice of language, operating system, environment, etc.

    • Alternatives? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) *
      Do you mean alternatives like CORBA, or like REST [xfront.com]? REST to me seems the proper way to go about web services for 99% of web services people are building. Most people are doing simple calls... the only trick that remains (and is evidenced in the interview) is a simple means of creating objects that represent web service calls and results, to make working with the calls more natural in the OO language that most corporations are using right now. I'm hoping a simple mapping layer on top of a pull parse is a g
    • But at the same time it's not so easy to pass a serialized type from one system to another without rolling your own solution. Int and String will have no problem but what happens when you try to pass a custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in .net to a j2ee system.

      I agree with what he said about it not being spec'd out but I also agree with you in saying it should be left out of the SOAP specs. I think that 3rd party software similiar to Borland's Janeva [borland.com] will come into play when interoperati
      • But at the same time it's not so easy to pass a serialized type from one system to another without rolling your own solution. Int and String will have no problem but what happens when you try to pass a custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in .net to a j2ee system.

        You have to face facts... there isn't a way to pass a "custom collection type that derives from a hashtable in .net" to a "j2ee" system because there isn't a general one-to-one correspondence between any two data structures.

        You

        • SOAP actually supports more complex types through the standard XML namespace extensions

          And it's a beautiful thing. For the GForge SOAP client [infoether.com] we can define a new complex type, "Bug", on the nuSOAP PHP SOAP server like this:

          // Add the definition of a Bug object
          $server->wsdl->addComplexType(
          &nb s p; 'Bug',
          'complexType',
          'struct',
          '',
          '',
          array(
          'id' => array('name'=>'id', 'type' => 'xsd:string'),
          'summary' => array('name'=>'summary', 'type' => 'xsd:string')
          )
          );

    • How about "almost right". I think that it should defined two types of time:
      Type 1 would be a signed 32 bit number holding the number of hours since 1/1/2000 00:00 (to the nearest 1/4 hour [or 1/8th if you want.. either way works]).
      Type 2 would be a signed 64 bit integer holding the number of seconds since the same timepoint.

      An optional Type 3 would be a signed 64 bit float specifying the same thing as type 2, only to fractions of a second near the timepoint (It's a standard float type, so it acts

      • Re:SOAP doesn't do much, but watch it scale (Score:4, Insightful)

        by David Leppik ( 158017 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @04:13PM (#6070944) Homepage
        Why not use SQL's DATE, TIME, DATETIME, and TIMESTAMP formats? There's already a spec (SQL '92) and any language that regularly talks to a database can already marshal them. Besides, quite a few (most?) web services are middleware on top of a database, so you might as well be consistent.
        • Funny you should mention date and time. XML schema's dateTime type requires you to spec timezone in the payload, what is it "2003-05-23 15:42:00 Z" style, but .NET framework ignores the zone. Apache Axis doesnt. Result, times sent between Axis and .NET end up 8 or 9 hours out in Pacific time. Hence my use of time_t marshalled as longs.
          • dateTime uses the ISO-compliant format:
            2003-05-23T15:42:00Z
            is the same as
            2003-05-23T10:42:00-05:00

            You have to import either format, and you can emit either format. Axis(at least in the beta releases), always emits Zulu format.

            There are several broken implementations out there, and as such, each should be tested before real use. By using time_t, you lose any and all timezone information, similar to Axis.

            Also, xsd:Date and xsd:Time are just restrictions of dateTime, so a good implementation of dateTime g
            • Axis includes TZ info if you send a java.util.Calendar object; it only assumes Zulu for java.util.Date instances. So use Calendar instancess everywhere (which is what it currently does when mapping WSDL to java) and you do retain the info.

              But .NET assumes local timezone for everything, mapping it down to the .NET wrapper round time_t, dropping TZ info and generally making a mess. That is why I have to use time_t, and document the fact that this is always in UTC in the service specs. An ugly hack, I know.

              O
    • I've always found that SOAP had all the markings of a specification developed by a committee that want to make sure that everything made it in to the first draft. Personally, I prefer XML RPC : http://www.xmlrpc.com/

      Jason.
    • SOAP is very light weight considering its alternatives. In-so-far as you can serialize objects to W3C Schema primitive types, you can avoid the difficulties of complex marshaling one incurs with other distribute service mechanisms (the stubs/skeletons of CORBA, etc.). The W3C Schema types are a quick and easy standard that are independent of choice of language, operating system, environment, etc.

      Two of the main tenants underlying SOAP are broken:

      * Size does not matter

      * Efficiency does not matter

      Earth t
  • I used to know San back in the early days of the computer scene around Ottawa...Nice to see he doing well. He used to run a great BBS too!

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • marketing experience (Score:4, Funny)

    by haa...jesus christ ( 576980 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @02:58PM (#6070211)
    why does his DJ description read like marketing-speak?

    San's years of DJing experience playing parties and clubs from California to Canada have put him close in touch with the dancefloor and its needs. ;)
  • One is evil and was born at Microsoft, the other is evil and was born in Germany (mostly)... Being a long time House music producer (House was born in CHICAGO USA!) and Java programmer I have this to say:

    Don't give Trance a Chance! and Web services go much better with a cup of Java!

    Ok, I really have nothing against .NET or trance. But you won't see any trance in my record crate, and there will be no VB.NET in any of my projects!

    • One is evil and was born at Microsoft, the other is evil and was born in Germany (mostly)...

      Having just spent about three hours listening to trance while coding in C#, I can personally vouch for the safety of using the two together. Over-enthusiatic listeners may want to invest in an extra-sturdy keyboard, however.

      EXCEPTION: Under no circumstances should you mix Trance music, .NET, and a large array of multicolored strobe lights. If you think the headache you got from the 60 Hz monitor refresh rate

  • For those doing ASP.NET development (all six of us), check out Nikhil Kothari weblog [nikhilk.net]. Pretty exciting the tidbits he's posting about Web Matrix, the free ASP.NET IDE. Depending on how the full release goes, I may just move most of my "personal" ASP.NET development to Web Matrix just based on ease of use alone. No intellisense, but most of my heavy lifting of code I'll be putting in .dlls created in VS.NET anyways.

  • SOAP ON A ROPE (Score:4, Funny)

    by paulydavis ( 91113 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @03:06PM (#6070274)
    my favorite thing he says is "SOAP allows you to do a lot, but also gives you just enough rope to hang yourself." must be soap on a rope.
    • my favorite thing he says is "SOAP allows you to do a lot, but also gives you just enough rope to hang yourself." must be soap on a rope.

      The original ms soap toolkit had object called "ROPE" Remote object procedure enviroment or some shit. Still remember meeting with the suits of my company explaining to them that our ms office addon was going to use SOAP with Ms's Rope object. You should of seen the look on their faces. Not to mention MS also has publication and discovery procedure called DISCO.

  • I think this article is just the sort of information we need in the technology community. There has been too much hype about web services in from the marketing departments of IBM, Sun, Microsoft and others. I have the basic grasp of what it does and how it works, though haven't coded with it yet. Mehat's experiences sound very much like my experiences trying out a new, immature toolkit and finding it exciting (in promise) but frustrating (in reality and limitations). Without this sort of ground-level view,

  • I think it's just going to take someone to be loud. Any New Yorkers out there?
    • Right here, bitch!

      Me and my boys are gonna go take a ride over to the W3C's turf and, uhh, make them some offers they can't refuse.

      And if they don't like our answers, well, they'll be writing specs from underneath Jets stadium with their newest member, Jimmy Hoffa on board!

      (For all you federal governemnt spy-types out there, this post does NOT constitute a threat to anyone or anything, it is mearly a rather sad attempt at humor. Please, don't go busting the door down in my house to get me, my kids are t
  • I must say that this is one stellar development platform. Once you're over the initial learning curve from whatever it was you were using before, you can create web applications at an increible pace. It's rock solid as well, I keep it patched and its never ever crashed on me. The amount of documentation, examples, code libraries etc available at your fingertips are mind numbing. With this being a Microsoft product as well goes to show that perhaps the money hungry M$ isn't half bad after all. In fact, after
    • Since it will be hard to find people that believe the same as you here at /., I will. I, for one, am sold on .Net development as well. I enjoy it immensely; it is too bad that a lot of people here won't even give it a try because it is a MS product.
    • I've recently started developing in C# with VS.NET. It is very cool. Even the visual database wizard thingies are useful time savers if you are careful when and when not to use them.

      A tip that wasn't immediately obvious to me as a beginner: To use the visual db tools in your non-form classes, inherit the class from System.ComponentModel.Component (or select 'Component Class' when adding a class from the menu). All the examples in books etc seem to only show them being used with forms which is bad for separ
    • For web service development in the J2EE world, and soon for much else (portals, workflow management) you might like to take a look at BEA's Workshop [bea.com].

      I like its approach to messaging a lot - makes SOAP/HTTP just another transport like JMS, presents RPC and async alternatives very clearly and shows what's going on message-wise live, rather than being a separate code generator.

  • Some minor correction and some questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @03:25PM (#6070447)

    But, we live in a world where STL is a normal thing. If you're a C++ or Java programmer or any kind of an object-oriented programmer, you must have some semblance of containers

    I don't think .net has generics yet [microsoft.com].

    The questions: Mono is the .net runtime/compiler/interpreter for C# (yet). But what about the proprietary code ? the windows forms etc ? All the .net apps that have a MS-based gui will not be allowed to run in mono. Will they ? And how will mono handle those Win32 calls ? Maybe through wine ?

    • I'm pretty sure by containers he meant the collections (like arrays and hashtables) that we all have today.
    • You are confusing C#, the language that MSFT is pushing with .NET) and CLR, the bytecode and virtual machine. C# doesn't have generics yet, but managed C++ does. When C# does come up with generics (next major release), it will be the role of the compiler to generate CLR bytecodes out of your program files in the most elegant way possible, and without I hope, creating bloatware ala gcc 2.7 when templates were implemented in the gnu compiler.

  • And for those of us who despise VS.NET... (Score:4, Informative)

    by CrazyJ020 ( 219799 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @03:33PM (#6070532) Homepage
    Tools like Apache Axis and Visual Studio .NET help you with this, because they have these WSDL tools that look at your classes, look at your exposed interfaces, and attempt to generate a WSDL file that can be consumed. With Visual Studio .NET, it's incredibly easy. You add a web reference, aim the web reference at the WSDL, and it creates stub classes for you automatically.
    It is even easier with the free .NET SDK :
    C:\work>wsdl /nologo http://www.xignite.com/xretirement.asmx?WSDL
    Writ ing file 'C:\work\XigniteRetirement.cs'.

    C:\work>
    And also... My fellow Java developer and myself have had zero problems exchanging complex types over web services. There is no problem with XML/SOAP. The problem lies in immature proxy generators. WebSphere Studio Application Developer and the .NET SDK proxy generator have no problems creating compatible complex types, including collections.

  • What a neat sham! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    San Mehat is an anagram of Neat Sham.

  • overcoming datastructure hurdles... (Score:4, Informative)

    by freejamesbrown ( 566022 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @04:13PM (#6070930)
    in my experience... if you wanna pass more complex datastructures over webservices, you send objects encoded as xml strings... then decode the xml into the native structures you want.

    sure, it's work, but so it goes.

    that's how we've gotten around a lack of standardization of higher level objects.

    i've been writing a set of java services to serve as a linux option to some .NET services already in place. the hardest stuff i've had to tackle in the interoperability between java and .NET is getting into the soap headers... and then just getting commonality between encryption classes etc. lot's of hurdles and non-overlapping block styles and things. drive me crazy!

    gosh, and then how some of those wsdl and stub generator tools in java land have changed and produce different code. shoot me now!
    m.
  • Now we know why there's so much .Net coverage on the slashdot shopping network these days. All those Microsoft acronyms which have emerged in the last 3 years make my eyes water. Is that really the big thing people are doing now?
  • We recently incorporated WSDL parsing support into the project. SOAPpy has already been released with the new support. ZSI will shortly be released.

    WSDL support is most definitely in Python. :)

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