Nick Gall's Profile

Users don't care about what the designer does. They care about what they do. If every time you drove a car, you had to learn the meaning of 100 knobs, the whole system wouldn't work. Simplicity comes from tuning down the tasks required to drive the car into a certain set of understood paradigms and tools. Yes, there are many people who would love to pull up the hood and start tinkering with things. You can let them, as long as that is all under the hood.

There is nothing wrong with having all those knobs. I mentioned the complexity of Swing before, that JButton has more than 200 methods even though most of the time people care about maybe five of them. My solution would be to design the system so that it had a getKnobs() method. JButton would have 10 methods, including getKnobs(). It would return a ButtonKnobs object, which lets you play with all the little ditties if needed. Then JButton's surface area to a newcomer would be nine methods plus a way to get under the hood.

In the 1970s the Wombles were Britain’s great engineers. They designed, built and fixed stuff by focusing on what was available and what worked, rather than using the proper stuff. There are lessons here for both software engineers and interaction designers.

The best answer, Dr. Neumann says, is to build computers that are secure and stable from the start. A system with fewer flaws also deters hackers, he said. “If you design the thing right in the first place, you can make it reliable, secure, fault tolerant and human safe,” he said. “The technology is there to do this right if anybody wanted to take the effort.”

He was part of an effort that began in the 1960s to develop a rock-solid network-operating system known as Multics, but those efforts gave way to more commercially successful systems. Multics’ creators were so farsighted, Dr. Neumann recalled, that its designers even anticipated and prevented the “Year 2000” problem that had to be corrected in other computers. That flaw, known as Y2K, caused some machines to malfunction if they detected dates after Jan. 1, 2000. Billions of dollars were spent to prevent problems.

Dr. Neumann, who has been preaching network stability since the 1960s, said, “The message never got through.” Pressures to ship software and hardware quickly and to keep costs at a minimum, he said, have worked against more secure and robust systems.

“We throw this together, shrink wrap it and throw it out there,” he said. “There’s no incentive to do it right, and that’s pitiful.”

The building blocks for portable social networks already exist. OpenID, microformats and Oauth let us build open, user controlled networks. We'll talk about why this is good for users, how to actually put these building blocks in place and why portable social networks will ultimately be very good for business.

Thousands of software developers are creating features for Facebook, the rapidly growing social network, many hoping to strike it rich alongside Facebook’s own employees.

In this position you will analyze, design and implement application systems
for the Client One Applications Infrastructure team in support of the Branch
Division. Position will be assigned to projects within the centralized Data
Program involving Service Oriented Architecture development on the Tandem
platform.

Function
Address technical infrastructure requirements as clients move towards
new business models and technologies.
Service offerings cover the full life cycle from technical
architecture to implementation and commissioning of new technical
infrastructure.
Required Skills
Successfull track record in enterprise wide technical infrastructure
development.
Presentation,negotiation and facilitatation skills.
Strong organization and interpersonal skills(Ability to work on
multiple concurrent assignments)
Management of client relationships at all levels.
Technical Disciplines
Infrastructure Standards(OMG,The Open Group,Microsoft Standards)
Service oriented architecture model for distributed computing(Corba
model,DCOM/ActiveX,Message Brokers,transaction management and the
migration to Object Transaction Monitors)

An architecture for dynamic e-business

Enter the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA [see Resources]). SOA is a conceptual architecture for implementing dynamic e-business. Today, most of the systems and applications running in the business world are made up of tightly-coupled applications and subsystems. The drawback with this is that a change to any one subsystem can causes breakage in a variety of dependent applications. This brittle aspect of existing systems is in part responsible for the high cost of system maintenance and the limitations around the number of trading partners one can manage.

SOA is not a new concept. In fact, about a year and a half ago, HP's e-speak appeared with a marketing campaign built around a proprietary implementation of SOA. Due in part to its proprietary requirements, e-speak failed to make much of a market impact.

As recently as February 2001, HP revamped their software strategy to embrace the coupling of distributed components via SOAP, but they remain partially proprietary on the service interface definition language (IDL) of their solution. Nevertheless, the potential concept of SOA was found to have merit by companies like IBM and Microsoft who recognized that for SOA to succeed where other distributed computing concepts had failed, it must be implemented on open standards. Thus, the recent cooperation between these companies on recommended standards like UDDI and WSDL. More on that later!

Regardless of the implementation, SOA is comprised of three participants and three fundamental operations (see Figure 2).

The Web Services architecture describes the principles behind the next generation of e-business architectures, presenting a logical evolution from object-oriented systems to systems of services. Web Services systems promote significant decoupling and dynamic binding of components: All components in a system are services, in that they encapsulate behavior and publish a messaging API to other collaborating components on the network. Services are marshaled by applications using service discovery for dynamic binding of collaborations. Web Services reflect a new service-oriented architectural approach, based on the notion of building applications by discovering and orchestrating network-available services, or just-in-time integration of applications.