The eight fallacies of distributed computing

Read this four times a day before meals. It is good for your soul. Especially recommended for those who think using SOAP or XML-RPC to make function calls accross a network is a viable distributed computing architecture for enterprise applications:-)

Desktop Unix has reached the tipping point?

On ITWorld : Desktop Unix reaching a tipping point?.

JPublish looks very interesting

I've just come across JPublish. Velocity + Jython for actions via the BSF on a servlet engine.
I rolled something like this myself ages ago with straight Tomcat Servlets but now I can piggy-back on a setup that includes a templating engine.
Excellent.

X#

I don't often agree with Don Box but three cheers for this:

"If we just make Web services look like CORBA, we will be missing a big opportunity"

He goes on to say that development of a "data oriented language" will be one of the most interesting areas
for innovation in the next five years.
He's absolutely right. The Java/J2EE camp needs to get off its "all you need is the Java programming language" deathmarch
soon. Heck, just endorsing a beautiful, high level scripting languages with strong support for XML would work wonders
for J2EE's power as an (data oriented) XML processing environment.
Jython anyone?

XML in Office? So what?

How open is the new Office?. "XML" and "Proprietary" are completely compatible words you know. XML is a syntax and a spirit but only the syntax is mandatory.

I want to believe, I really do but I'm not falling for the "It's in XML so its completely open ya know" mullarky and neither should you. Office is as open as my ability to round-trip office XML through my own XML systems losslessly having modified them in some way. To do that I need full disclosore of the semantics of the markup. I get that from a combination of machine readable schemata and narrative text. A bag'o'tags don't mean diddly squat on their own,