netzooid

Tim O’Brien left a comment in my Blog on my post about O’Reilly Connection:

The thing I like about Connection already is the fact that I can go get the FOAF data and do something like these graphviz graphs, try doing that with LinkedIn or Friendster…

As I like graphs, I’d strongly suggest taking a look at some of his graphs. Like this one showing everyone within two degress of Tim. The red is Tim O’Reilly

How cool is that! Hooray for open data and the ability to visualize connections. That definnitely gives O’Reilly Connection a point in the score book. Be sure to read the comments on the graphs as they’re pretty insightful.

Apologies to those who saw feed entries a gazillion times. I don’t quite have a knack for rewrite rules, but I think I got it fixed now. Thanks for your patience.

For those of you who are sick of my some what dyslexic blogging in different topics, I’ve decided to seperate out my ramblings on logistics into a new blog – leangistics. Its focused on the intersection of tech, logistics and supply chains. Its an experiment at this time and I reserve the right to stop at any point :-). Check out the inagural post explaining the name and what’ll be happening there.

So I switched to Wordpress. I like it a lot better then textpattern mainly because it includes trackback support and has a lot more plugins. I still need to update the site design and layout, but I’ve got all the links redirected and everything imported.

Yay blogs.

Java and DOM sucks. There is no decent open source DOM toolkit to be had.

Criteria:

• Efficient
• Has an intuitive and friendly API
• Uses javax.xml.namespace.QName instead of its own version or no QNames
• Has a commercial friendly license (LGPL doesn’t count because too many people are scared of it and conflicting interpretations)

DOM4J: Has #1, #4 and a little of #2

JDOM: Has #2, #4, not sure about #1

XOM: Has #1, #2

W3C DOM: Has #3 and #4, not sure about #1

Update: DOM4J performance isn’t too bad as a commenter pointed out. XOM is still faster I believe though.

From the latest Supply Chain Digest First Thoughts

Think about it – why won’t someone start “Demand Planners Inc.“ in Bangalore, staffed with a bunch of brilliant forecasters with PhD’s that speak English impeccably?

Its true, “outsourcing” is spreading to everything. I know a trucking carrier/broker startup that is planning on outsourcing a lot of itself. They have live video link ups between the US and India.

Technology will have a huge effect on this as the article alludes to. I always maintain that technology pretty much sucks now in logistics and SCM. Everything is very expensive, high barrier – which is the wrong model. Think how something as simple as RSS could change the industry. What a great way to keep people abreast of whats happening throughout the supply chain! (Sidenote: Thats why we integrated it into DocShot – so its possible get feeds of your documents going in and out of your organization). Or look at how IM is changing things. As things move to completely digital, your physical location matters a whole lot less (I say this as someone who spends nearly all his time working from home).

Do you believe traditional supply chain jobs in planning and execution could be outsourced to lower cost countries? What would be the barriers? What should SCM professionals do to minimize the chance that their job goes to India?

Absolutely, outsourcing will change things. Ultimately, you need to find something that you offer the most value at. If someone else, can offer more value then you – here or in another country – you should take a look at what you’re doing.

Update: Looks like I’m going to have to eat my words, as it turns out this is very possible. I was just looking at the wrong place. sigh.

First, JAXB 2.0 is very cool. I was able to get up and running with the RI in a few seconds literally. XJC worked like a charm (the schema to POJO generator). Marshalling/unmarshalling was very easy.

However, I am a bit miffed at lack of an API to create a schema from one’s annotated POJOs. Especially when a stated goal is:

JAXB 2.0 will specify the mapping from Java TM to XML Schema.

It assumes I’ll only ever need to generate a schema at build time, and doesn’t even specify a standard way to do that. All I want is:

Document doc = jaxbContext.createSchema("urn:my-namespace");

Why do you need this? Instead of requiring users to build a WSDL document up front and generate stubs for SOAP services, users could create a service class with their JAXB POJOs as the method parameters. Then the SOAP toolkit can build a WSDL document dynamically. XFire can already do this with XMLBeans and I want to be able to do it with JAXB 2.0.

I guess its time to get on the JAXB mailing list…

Plazes via Jeremy Zawodny

What an awesome site. The cell phone operators and their “location based services” continue to piss me off. Ridiculous pricing. You must use MapPoint Location Server. Come on. This is something with a much lower barrier to entry and people can start building cool software for it now.

Christian Weyer has just released their WSCF (web services contract first) plugin for Eclipse.:

This plugin is embedded into Eclipse and enables modelling and designing your Web Services interface contract without having to reveal to know all nittry-gritty – and honestly: unnecessary – details of WSDL 1.1. It uses our very successful WSCF, namely the WSDL Wizard component.

I’ve been testing it out and its great! Its very handy for developing services sine all you really need to write is the schema. I’m also planning integrating it into my talk Web Services for Java Developers talk at Java in Action later this fall where I’m going to compare a bunch of different development methods.

Might I add its great to see some cross-polination of tools from the .NET world to the Java world. They got some cool stuff going on there.

As I work more and more on DocShot, it strikes me that there is way too much mundane work in getting a web application up and running for the general public. The parts that I enjoy involve the ideation and execution. It’d be great if I could focus solely on that and some one else could provide the core services that we need:

• Scalable Infrastructure: A grid of computers which provide bandwidth, processing power and storage for my applications. Ideally I just package up my application and deploy it. Kind of like Google has.
• Customer Service: Ticket tracking, FAQ/Issue database
• Billing: Credit card handling, invoicing, and the many issues that go along with all those things.
• Project Mangement: Source control, issue tracking, etc.
• Company Infrastructure: Email or Exchange server, collaboration tools

Ideally the costs would scale with my business revenue. Then I could focus completely on killer applications.