Controversial Purple Cow

This post (via Radovan) brings a very nice idea about marketing your products by using social software instead of common marketing techniques. However it's clear medium-to-large companies are not brave enough to do the suggested changes. So there is a chance for startups, I'm looking forward to see next purple cows, growing and growing :)

Frank Cohen on FastSOA

There are plenty of interviews about SOA, but this caugth my eye recently. Frank Cohen adresses scalability and performance issues in a concept he calls FastSOA. I like his approach, which is practical and can be used on the enterprise level. I will not recount the whole interview here, just a short quote:

FastSOA addresses these problems:

• Solves SOAP binding performance problems by reducing the need for Java objects and increasing the use of native XML environments to provide SOAP bindings.
• Introduces a mid-tier service cache to provide SOA service acceleration, transformation, and federation.
• Uses native XML persistence to solve XML, object, and relational incompatibility.

Never stop swimming

Participating on a project in Copenhagen, I often go swimming to strech a bit after the whole day sitting. There is a wonderful swimming pool there, it is elliptic so you can swim for ever. One round is about 100 meters. If you have a chance, pay a visit to this place.

WS test client with XPath validation

I just needed a general web service client for testing purposes, which can create a request from an input file, posts it to an endpoint and validates a response if it follows some basic structure. Prefrably all in Java.
Well, I could use some existing tools, eg. soapUI, but I've decided to develop it by myself. It was suprisingly easy, here is a simplified recipe:
1) take the Jakarta Commons HTTPClient
2) add some other Commons stuff like CLI, Configuration, mix it carefully so your HTTP client gets all the needed parameters like endpoint URL, payload etc.
3) POST the request
4) take an XPath engine like Jaxen
5) validate a response by an XPath expression
5) bake it, serve it hot

Enjoy :)