SOA Maturity Model

It has been a number of years since the Open Group created a working group for SOA. This working group has just published OSIMM, which stands for the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model. This allows you to measure a company's maturity with respect to SOA. It sounds a lot like the CMMi maturity level for software development.

The top level in the model is SOA with dynamic service composition. And the bottom level is essentially No SOA. Unfortunately I think our project is at the bottom of the heap. We currently do not implement any SOA just yet. There is some talk though. And we will be processing XML input this upcoming year.

The Death of XHTML 2

This semester I am in a web programming class. We are going to learn XHTML. For now I assume that XHTML is HTML adhering to XML standards. A quick scan of my textbook seems to indicate you can just add three lines to your HTML document to make it an XHTL one. We shall see.

It was exciting to see XHTML in the news recently. Well it was exciting until I found that we are about to see the end of XHTML 2. The W3C has decided to pursue HTML 5 instead. I am not sure if this means XHTML in general is dead, or if it is specific to the XHTML 2 specification.

I have head that HTML 5 is not all that exciting. It is a means to combat the rise of competing technologies such as Silverlight and Flash. Apparently Internet Explorer is not supporting all of HTML 5 features. That's a bit of a concern, as I think IE still leads the browser market. Perhaps Microsoft wants to push Silverlight at the expense of their browser. I will check back later when I learn more XHTML in class.

WTF is XML

I often see message board posts asking what exactly XML is. The first Google link will take you to Wikipedia, where the acronym is translated as the Extensible Markup Language. It is defined as a set of rules for encoding documents. Sounds simple enough.

Here is the funny thing. I don't think they teach XML in college. Not even in computer science digress. If it was described in a class, it would be in the Web 2.0 class, which happens to not exist.

Some have called XML a complicated protocol. Others just call it a file type. An easy way of dealing with XML is to use tools to take care of the details. Actually I want to correct my initial statements. The very first link on Google search was a sponsored one by Altova. They were pushing their XML Spy program. I have used it before. Even though it is expensive, it makes XML easier to deal with.

But I digress. XML lets humans read file contents. The files themselves are ASCII text, which get sent over the Internet using the TCP/IP transmission protocol. I have written a whole blog about this subject. We plan to import XML files in our system at work next year. I wanted to purchase a copy of XMLSpy for use at work. However the price tag seems to have given my customer caution. The tool is not more expensive than some of the other software development tools they buy me. However XML is more specialized, and I am not sure I can justify the return on investment.