Simeon Simeonov

This is a call to action to everyone building clients, servers and frameworks for rich Internet applications (RIAs) to improve the life of RIA developers by improving the debugging of backend services RIAs depend on. I’d like to thank the people who’ve offered valuable feedback a... (more)

I’ve been around software for 20 years now. Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the progress we’ve made. The end results have been amazing but the process of building software hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 80s. In fact, I see us make some of the same mistakes over ... (more)

Talk to a grizzled broadcast TV exec and he’ll lament consumer choice: the choice of many cable/sat channels, the choice of spending time online or in front of the TV, the choice of whether to watch ads or fast-forward through them, etc. In short, consumer choice == less m... (more)

Emergence is a strong, albeit sometimes unpredictable force. The past two weeks have been full of some interesting conversations/observations. Google bought JotSpot. I was reminded yet again that Google Calendar is a great product, Gmail is a strange one and Docs and Spreadsheet ... (more)

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another-this time velvet-revolution. E-commerce 2.0 is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now 10+ year old predecessor. It's about time. What makes an e-commerce 2.0 site? Well, as ... (more)

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it’s easy to ignore another – this time velvet – revolution. "E-commerce 2.0" is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now ten-plus year old predecessor. It’s about time. What makes... (more)

"Metcalfe's Law is Wrong," contended Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly recently in a much-discussed IEEE Spectrum article, in which they wrote: "Of all the popular ideas of the Internet boom, one of the most dangerously influential was Metcalfe's Law." Sim Simeonov ... (more)

I've been around software for 20 years now. Looking back, I have mixed feelings about the progress we've made. The end results have been amazing, but the process of building software hasn't fundamentally changed since the 80s. In fact, I see us making some of the same mistakes ov... (more)

The challenge of integrating software and systems will always be with us. In the brief but turbulent history of information technology, creation and destruction go hand in hand. Old technologies and approaches give way to new ones, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a fight. Ye... (more)

In 1975 Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist who created the Pascal programming language, published a seminal book entitled Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. If Wirth had written about business applications, Computing + Storage = Applications would have been a bette... (more)

You must have seen them - they're everywhere. Despite the market climate, Web services startups are popping up like mushrooms after rain. With no time to lose, these companies are readying themselves to take on the industry gorillas. Who's going to win? Much has been written abo... (more)

There's been much recent controversy about the role of Microsoft and IBM in the evolution of Web services standards. At a conference I attended not so long ago a pundit talked about the "standard setting duopoly." Several articles have been written about the "undemocratic" practi... (more)

Call me a cynic, but I don't think companies participate in standards development out of altruism. Enterprises are in the business of making their products and technologies successful. In an increasingly interconnected technology landscape, standards are the keys to interoperabil... (more)

It's been a long time since the last XML in Transit column. Did you miss my musing on Web services? I doubt it. More likely, you were busy keeping up with all the new initiatives in the Web services space. Those of you with corporate responsibilities were probably wondering how t... (more)

This article is based on the UDDI chapter in Building Web Services, to be released this month. It appears here in slightly different form by permission of the publisher, Sams. Contributors to the book are Doug Davis, Steve Graham, Yuichi Nakamura, and Ryo Neyama from IBM; Toufic ... (more)

This article is based on the UDDI chapter in Building Web Services (Sams), a book I've written with Doug Davis, Steve Graham, Yuichi Nakamura, and Ryo Neyama from IBM, Toufic Boubez from Saffron Technology, and Glen Daniels from Macromedia. It's scheduled for release early next m... (more)

There was a period around 1999-2000 when anything XML was hyped beyond belief. An XML-centric GUI tool, no matter how narrow in focus, attracted interest and, often enough, VC funding. The net result was a myriad of XML tools - really XML gadgets - that tried to address a large n... (more)

As we look at the evolution of both object and component programming models it's clear that the concept of an object or component registry is an essential element that facilitates the discovery and use of components. Imagine trying to write Java code without access to a browsable... (more)

In the last installment of XML in Transit (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 5), we established a framework for Web Services usage. The key roles in the framework are service providers, requesters, and brokers (see Figure 1). Moreover, the basic Web Services use workflow involves five steps (... (more)

In my last XML in Transit column (XML-J, Vol. 2, issue 5) we looked in detail at the technical aspects of the service description layer of the Web Service interoperability stack (see Figure 1). In fact, the topic of our discussion - Web Services Description Language - has now bee... (more)