Jesus Rodriguez's WebLog

I am super excited to see W3C taking this initiative. There are lots of data exchange scenarios that are can be benefited from the use of RDF and undoubtedly designing the mechanisms for representing relational data as RDF graphs is a big step forward. ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) already did some prototyping of a similar idea.

If you haven’t seen it, SQL Server 2008 February CTP is available for download.

Stress testing is one of key aspects that developers should take into consideration in order to maximize the performance of Web Service deployments. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a very extensible framework for monitoring and configuring WCF Services performance profiles. However one key pieces of successful load testing is precisely to execute the correct tests and for that using the correct tools is fundamental. Load tests are typically based on relatively complex algorithms that encompass aspects such as thread management, memory, message throughput, etc. For instance, a typical Web Service test might include sending a thousand messages per second to a Web Service using five threads until the consumed memory hits 1GB. Such algorithms require a detailed knowledge of the Web Service technology as well as the operating system being used.

The fist CTP of Unity(next version of DIAB)  is now available at CodePlex. I plan to play with it this week and share my impressions in a later post.

This idea is definitely interesting. Although most of the challenges of dealing with WSDL appear after the WSDL is created L. If you still have any doubts of the power of RelaxNG you should look take a look at the relax-ws syntax and compare it with the WSDL XSD.

I've playing around with the new preview of Oracle SOA Suite. Among the new features, Business Events is the most attractive to me and it can be considered Oracle's first iteration towards a complete Complex Event Processing platform based on different technologies of the SOA Suite. Additionally, the implementation of Service Component Architecture (SCA) as part of the SOA Composite Editor is definitely interesting although I am still not convinced of its applicability on Enterprise scenarios.

Steve Vinoski posted an interesting reflection about the use of description languages on RESTful services. I have to agree 200% with Steve, WSDL and 1.1 and simply horrendous. Although WSDL 2.0 drastically improves in the modeling aspects of the services it does not solve one of the fundamental problems of its predecessors which tightly couple web Services with RPC and object oriented models. This gets even worse when you are working with ESBs or Integration Servers that are highly dependent on WSDL, sometimes you get the impression you are writing a big object oriented programL.  However, I still think that some sort of description language is really beneficial in a lot of scenarios such as service-endpoint discovery, policy description, service management and versioning. On those scenarios, the use of languages such as RDF, WADL, Atom or even tools such as Power Point or Excel can provide a better and more flexible solution than WSDL.

W3C has released new drafts of the Service Modeling Language specifications.