What is a 'brittle' interface?

Brittle interfaces are bad right? But do you and I mean the same thing by the word 'brittle'?. Read what is a brittle interface? to find out.

A mountable filesystem from your GMail account

Create a 1 GIG mountable filesystem from your GMail account. Sometimes you just gotta smile.

WS-Ectomy

Gregor talks a whole bunch of sense about WS-Yikes. The last para resonates strongly with my own approach:

"""Therefore, I propose to many of my clients to use the WS-* standards as a checklist for their designs. I generally do not recommend they use WS-Addressing or WS-ReliableMessaging (or at least not right out of the gate). I do, however, challenge them by asking, "What is your strategy to track messages in case of error?" or "How do you intend to support asynchronous messaging?" The answer has sometimes little to do with Web Services. For example, the answer to reliable asynchronous messaging might be to use JMS or MQ or another middleware that ensures guaranteed delivery of asynchronous messages. And that's OK. ..."""

It is truly amazing how much you can do just with URIs (applied RESTfully) and an underlying off-the-shelf, boring-as-the-day-is-long reliable asynchronous messaging substrate.

If you have better things to be doing than tracking WS-Palimpsest and struggling to debug WS-InterferencePatterns, I suggest you get an asynch messaging substrate in place, off the shelf *now* and work forward from there.