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San Mehat On Web Services & .Net
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.
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.
Is that Visual Studio eats a monstrous one. It's really hard to develop (in VB.NET - ack - not my choice) on an IDE that is buggier than an ant farm. Every time I build it's basically 50/50 whether or not the compiler is going to start throwing spurrious exceptions.
Give me Java, or give me death.
Microsoft pushes it all a little bit too much. It's really not worth it.
This is RiverTonic's sig.
Doesn't 'San Mehat' sound like it would be a joke name, like Heywood Jablowme or Hugh G. Rection?
What's San's job at VA, locking the doors whenever he sees the repo man coming?
The goatse guy for president. Win one for the gaper!
.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.
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.
.Net does not use it by default but rather uses SOAP enveloping with Literal encoding.
SOAP encoding is recognized as incompatible and limiting which is why
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" ?
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.
I put the 'fun' in fundamentalism
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
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
And everything unix can do can also be done in BASICA. Unix is BASICA with a lot more functionality, at the cost of usability.
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:
.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!
Don't give Trance a Chance! and Web services go much better with a cup of Java!
Ok, I really have nothing against
TallGreen CMS hosting
For those doing ASP.NET development (all six of us), check out Nikhil Kothari weblog. 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.
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.
Do you mean alternatives like CORBA, or like REST? 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 good answer - I'm trying out JiBX for that although it's still rather beta.
In theory with a good mapper to and from the XML should alleviate the collection problem they talked about in the article by naturally generating good XML for Maps and Lists, and converting back just as easily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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, it's too hard to tell if web services is an important part of a system architecture, or whether it needs more time.
p!
"I honestly would vote libertarian if their candidates weren't usually total cooks."--slashdot poster
Moderators please mod this down. It is not the current article and it has nothing to do with the .Net framework. It is talking about the other nebulous .Net initiatives at Microsoft that died long ago. The programming languages and framework are well and alive.
This is just a poor troll.
Hemos wrote:
> And, in the interest of full disclosure, San does work for VA Software, the parent company of OSDN.
And, in the interest of full disclosure, devchannel is a OSDN site as well. How incestuous.
Dance music sucks. Period.
I think it's just going to take someone to be loud. Any New Yorkers out there?
Sure, web services isn't so bad...as long as you don't drop the SOAP!
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 my experience with .NET, I'd have to say that I'm become a huge fan of Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET product.
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.
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 ?
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.
He really doesn't know anything and just blabs on and on about how little he knows. If you haven't read the article, don't bother, it doesn't teach you anything new.
I used to be fairly active on the 613/819 boards.. what did he used to run?
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
Karma means fuck all to me, I appreciate having the info available on a non slashdotted server. When karma helps you losers move out of your mom's basement and gets you laid. Let me know.
Pubcrawler.ca
.
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 separation of display and logic.
My only real complaint: Why is browsing the documentation so slow? I know its huge etc but it seems like it needs a better indexing system or be in something more like a real database.
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 was bad, you ain't felt nothin' yet.
Amen brother!
.NET?
.Net framework is so much better than WIN32 that it isn't even worth comparing. There are some bugs, but for the most part it just works. Speed is OK also, especially considering how quickly applications can be built.
.NET model even more: Many languages, one platform.*
.NET.
.NET?
.NET is too good to be ignored. I tried to hate it at first, but eventually I was forced to look at the merits of it and I learned to love the product, even if I did hate the company. Let's all face it, if .NET was for Linux, we would all have been worshipping it as the second coming since it started.
.NET, but as of now, it is really only one platform
ASP.NET looked so good that I just had to try VS.NET! At first I didn't like the IDE, but it grew on me. I don't know if I would claim it to be a stellar product, but it is at least as good as any other IDE I have used.
Why do I like
1. ASP.NET makes things easy. My productivity has soared with it.
2. The
3. I used to love the Java model: One language, many platforms. But I love the
Allowing a group of developers to write their parts of an application in the language they are most familiar and comfortable with is an awesome experience. It works very well using
What I hate about
1. MS!!! Why oh why did I have to get sucked back in. I hate the company, but
*I know there are efforts to extend
I'm pretty sure by containers he meant the collections (like arrays and hashtables) that we all have today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
San Mehat is an anagram of Neat Sham.
This is a troll. A VB developer can be an Open Source developer at the same time.
The fact that you can get a ob easier with VB is irrelevant.
What?
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.
.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!
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
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.
I _love_ vs.net
.Net provides. (Sound is a gigantic pain in the ass for example.. and non-portable).
.Net is great, I like the VS.Net IDE... I'm still not in love with MS.
It's really fast to get what you want done..done as long as you work within the limits of what
My only problem is MS's constant whining for more money. Unless you buy the Enterprise version you get shafted as to the tools and technologies you can use. Don't even get me started on having to buy VS 2k3 6 months after I got 2k2.
SharpDevelop, Mono, WebMatrix... once these tools fully come into their own I can see transitioning from VS.Net without any sadness.
my 2 cents anyway
-bren
EMACS
dude, the fact that he's got his feet wet in both sides of the fence is a plus in my book. isn't the article about interoperability?
?
m.
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.
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.
He's bashing us /.ers!!! Let's get him! Show him your wrath by giving him ... ... NEGATIVE MOD POINTS!
Bwahahahahahahahah!
No' so fast: first post in the article was to 'guest'.
It's the kinda prank call that you'd make to Mensa or something. Moe's patrons certainly wouldn't get it.
You bad mouthing hats?! They cover our heads!
Blar.
Where can you get VS.Net 2003 for $20?
:-)
I'll rephrase, where can you get a legitimate copy of VS.Net 2003 for $20?
Please, don't hesitate to reply, I'm curious as to who you've blackmailed to get such a great deal.
I doubt if MS will ever allow WebMatrix to eat into VS.NET sales. Without auto-complete and about a million other little features it is not in the same league as VS.NET. If you need a small, simple light-weight ASP.NET IDE it is quite good but otherwise stick to VS. Sharpdevelop has auto-complete and looks promising. IIRR Borland where going to bring out a developer tool for C#/.NET also, although I've not checked that one out.
Didn't even bother to check the Mono site to see that there are, in fact, Mono implementations of ADO.NET and ASP.NET, including webforms. Come on.
I tried out .NET recently. It's actually obscenely easy to write GUI apps that look really good. Unfortunately, the baseline memory usage for a Windows Form app is 20MB. So, that pretty much rules it out for commercial projects.
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 to SOAP advocates: both of those things matter a great deal. Sure, there may be even more clumsy alternatives out there, but SOAP still ranks very high on the clumsy scale.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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?
For fun, I fired up some Java RMI examples, and the overhead was much better. 20% or so.
What we really need is pickle (python object serialization) implemented for every language. Then we could sling those giant lists of hash tables around like there was no tomorrow!
-- ac at home
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.
Do it for da shorties
http://saveie6.com/
Thank god there are tools to make it and consume it. For the uninitiated, it's not fun. It's not fun at all.
I've been using this tool for a few months, and even with its auto-magical bits, the WSDL still regularly gives me a headache. Oh, for the days of CORBA IDL.
I've been doing some hardcore webservices work lately and here's my .5 cents on this. There are some good things about web services in theory, but in practice the current implementations for WSDL, Schema and O/R mapping in .NET is majorly crippled. Before people start saying "what a load of crap" consider this. SOAP is a simple transport that doesn't understand the concept of transaction, which is fine, since it that wasn't the original goal. But that means deserializing and serializing complex objects has to be done with some other tools. The recommended method from Microsoft is to use Schema.
Schema has several major weaknesses, the primary one is it lacks the ability to inherit external types. Schema does support includes, but when the XML is converted/compiled to an object it essentially becomes flat. I'll clarify this a bit for those who haven't used schema. When schema is loaded to generate classes, the validation checks to make sure references to simple and complex types are valid. But to do so, it loads all the includes and builds one complete file. For applications that require modularity and custom extensions, schema simply doesn't work unless you build your own schema driver. What does this mean for an application?
Say you are using SOAP + Schema to build a messaging system and you want to dynamically update the messages incrementally because the messaging platform has to support tens of thousands of messages per hour. If you don't implement some kind of event mechanism within the generated objects, it would require you to transfer the entrie message, which consumes I/O and cpu time when it parses the XML. Take this use case. Say you have multiple messaging servers that can communicate on a peer-to-peer or master-slave basis. Now add several thousand clients that must recieve those messages and decide intelligently how to handle the message updates. An easy approach would be to have each of the objects register for a particular topic in the messaging server (assuming it's pub/sub). If you use the default schema driver, the classes do not extend any class or inherit any predefine logic. If you want all messaging objects to extend a base class which provides messaging subscription and intelligent updates, you have to write your own schema driver. Take another example. The default mode of building schema descriptions from a database is to open a connection to SQL Server, select the tables and VS.NET generates flattened schema models. On the surface that seems fine, if the data you want is flat. If the data you want is relational and has to preserve the structure or map to an object structure, you have to provide your own mapping implementation.
Do these kinds of problems exist in the java world? The answer is mostly no. For O/R mapping there's castor, jdo and numerous other mature drivers. Compiling schema to extend base classes, Castor provides the ability. Not only that, the Java solutions provide a more mature and flexible method of doing these types of operations. If you don't believe, try it yourself.
The cool features of WebMatrix are getting rolled into the version of VS.NET that is currently under development, and is supposed to be ready next year. So then you are supposed to be getting all you liked about WebMatrix, plus what you missed (like integrated debugging).
Not even a good troll. NGWS was Next Generation [b]Windows[/b] Services. So much for the "first ever" issue of your authoritative publication.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
How does Sharp Develop compare in quality and features to VS.NET? I might consider switching IDEs if it works as well or better.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
If what you want to do is have an IDE that integrated text editor and the free SDK C# compiler, it is OK. If you want the Visual Basicy kind of drag and drop on to a form and hook up events, it is still very much under development. If you want to use your legacy ActiveX controls (not a problem with VS.NET), that may be on the to-do-list but is not currently available.
Just write a few simple wrappers and extractors to get the vars from HTTP. SOAP and .NET web srvcs are a pedantic attempt to create more certification fees and consultant billing.
*piku piku piku!* *boom!* *bwooosh!!* *nreeeaarrrr...* Mayday! Mayday!
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