Long time no posts

Well - 10 days, but I have a fair excuse since i was out of the office in Cuba and Mexico. Unsurprisingly the world did not stand still in the meantime - Interesting stuff:

• A nice article on Service Oriented development in Java (found from Chris Leehman's blog)
• Roger Sessions (Objectwatch) on ACM Queue talking about the difference between Objects and Services which touches on interesting issues of trust in distributed object/service systems - do you trust yourself? Of course yes? or maybe no (not with jet lag anyway)...
• Some hope for speedier SOAP.
• Optimism about service oriented architectures is set to reach new highs... but i can't help thinking that this hype is rather pointless - the general concepts of service oriented systems are pretty straight forward and have been around a long time (as has knowledge of the inherent challenges). It seems inevitable they will emerge one way or another - but its far from clear how we go from the abstract notions to systems which really live up to the promise.
• Legged robots become obsolete (tip and story from the New Scientist - unfortunately the company's server seems to have been nuked by the attention...).
  

The prize for innovative project of the week goes to the liquid web - try liquid CNN. Interesting but it would seem a whole lot more interesting if A) annotations and changes were linked to their authors (so you could find out "who" you were reading, B) you could filter changes socialy to get a view containing only edits by people you identify with and C) it used common domain models and terms from the semantic web to better identify meaning of terms/items.

And finally is this the beginning of distraction? (well ok - maybe not :-)