TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

• Standing for the WS-I Board elections

I am now the official candidate for Cape Clear Software Inc. in the up coming elections to the board of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) as was announced in a press release earlier this week.

My platform for this candidacy is based on two core issues:

• the need for the WS-I Board to represent the small and medium sized firms who make up over ninety percent of the membership
• to promote greater transparency and accountability from the Board to the WS-I membership

As well as the usual news feed coverage, there have also been some interesting follow on stories appearing on Computergram [via The Register], STPforum, and eWeek in the last couple of days.

This is clearly a topic of wide interest to the industry, and does seem to be striking a chord based on some of the messages of support and interest I have received so far.

At the end of the day the WS-I membership will decide the final outcome, but this election is certainly raising some interesting issues and discussion points whatever the ultimate result.

• Electronic Tax Returns

I submitted my 2002 Self Assessment Tax Return electronically for the first time this year, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised how simple and straight forward it was to do. I could go to the Inland Revenue website (the UK equivalent of the IRS in the USA), enter all the details and figures over a period of days or weeks, get everything checked for errors, see the official calculations based on those figurtes, and then submit my completed return electronically and finaly download a PDF copy for my records.

This is really what the "Government Gateway" and "e-government" is all about, and it is good to see the UK making good progress in this area.

Now if I could just renew my car's road tax license over the Internet rather than having to make a special trip to the main Post Office tomorrow, I would be a happy man.......

• Log Jam in the Sent Items folder

I completely agree with this posting from Chris Anderson about dealing with e-mail :

Email Responsiveness

I'm not sure if this is a universal truth or not, but I suspect it is.

People can't manage their email.
[More...]

[ Chris Anderson - Email Responsiveness ]

I have been a member of the "aim for an empty Inbox" brigade for some time now, and I have the extensive hierarchy of mails filed into folders to prove it! It sure helps me see the wood for the trees, but of course causes some big headaches after returning from a 2-week vacation.

One of the biggest problems I find though is applying the same "aim-for-empty" policy to the Sent Items folder. I have the "In folders other than Inbox, save replies with original message" option activated in Outlook, but sometimes it just doesn't seem to work right when I expect it to. (it does work sometime, so I haven't quite worked out the exact causes yet) Add to that if you reply to a mail from the Inbox, the reply stays in the Sent Items box even if you file the original into a folder after replying, and you can see how the Sent Item folder can get very full and unstructured.

The idea of filing the mail, switch to the folder, re-open the mail and reply from there just does not work reliably for me. Apart from being a long way to do a simple task, it is also not an atomic action - a few times now I have had an interruption in mid-sequence and the reply never happens (oops). Just like with software, intermittent failures are always worse than predictable problems, so maybe the log jam in the Sent Items folder is the price I have to pay at the moment.

If anyone on the Outlook team at Microsoft is listening to this (or indeed anyone else using Outlook for that matter), I would be interested to hear your comments.

• The Search for the XML Oriented Programming Language

Several people have posted replies or follow on comments about my earlier blog about the emerging ideas around XML-Oriented Programming (XOP) Languages.

From Dare Obasanjo :

Some guy called Jorgen Thelin thinks an XML oriented programming language means a language that processes the PSVI (i.e. a language that is strongly tied to W3C XML Schema). [More...]

[Dare Obasanjo]

From Gordon Weakliem :

Jorgen Thelin responded to a post by James Strachan about X# where James questioned the value of an XML programming language [More...]

[Gordon Weakliem]

Starting with Dare's point, I don't think I did actually say that an XML oriented programming language would necessarily be based on PSVI, although that is certainly one of the options. Another possible angle is something more along the lines of XQuery as Dare points out. Equally there are the "scripting" based approaches such as used by MN8 or Jelly which may ultimately end up the winners.

I think both Dare's and Gordon's comments, plus my earlier postings actually all point to the same conclusion - we still don't know exactly what an XML-oriented programming language should or will look like, and to me that is the big question we have to bottom out during this year.

So I predict that 2003 will be the year we all experience the search for the true meaning of "XML-oriented programming"!

• Bill de hÓra's "Predictions for 2003"

Bill de hÓra makes some interesting technical Predictions for 2003

The ones about Web Services and XML strike a particular cord with me, and especially these:

• Versioning becomes the other hardest problem in webservices, along with security.
• W3C Schema is subsetted.
• Ant and RSS become far and away the most popular XML languages.

Only time will tell.

• Catching up

Back at work after the extended Christmas vacation, and catching up with all the correspondence and news.

I was able to spend some time in New York to see some of the sights and soak up some of the Christmas spirit which the Big Apple does so well. I have only managed to spend many boring hours "passing through" JFK airport before, so this was my first visit to NYC itself.

I spent some time at Ground Zero, to pay my respects to all those who died, but also to see the plans for a replacement building. There is a lot of debate about how best to balance the need for combining remembrance with renewal and rebuilding, but from what I saw I think a good balance will be reached overall.

I was very impressed with all the lights and decorations - one of the most striking being the very patriotic display at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

In contrast, I have to say the decorations in London this year provided a very disappointing comparison with those in NYC, and in my opinion London's efforts were an absolute disgrace for one of the major capital cities of the world. I know many people in London have similar feelings about this, so hopefully Mayor Ken is listening and things will improve for next time.