Bi-Tek

Johnston County in North Carolina has gotten a temporary court order to get Google to remove a page from cache. The page contained the personal information of county residents including social security numbers and cell phone numbers. The news has focused the fact that Google did not respond instantaneously causing Johnston County to seek a court order from an NC judge and not the fact that one of the county's contractors was negligent in its handling of sensitive data.

While it is disturbing that Google doesn't respond faster to requests to clear Personally Identifiable Information from its cache... Johnston county did leave the information languishing on the Internet for six weeks. And, how did this information make it to the web anyhow?

The News and Observer Article states that Bi-Tek creates a file that is posted to the Johnston county website and this file is supposed to contain only names, addresses, and non-private account numbers. Bi-Tek made a mistake that instead posted private data to the Internet.

Earlier this year the VA had its own incident where it potentially exposed the personal information of millions of veterans. Proving that large and small organisations alike have to fight employee ignorance, malice, and indifference regarding sensitive data. The questions that the press should really be asking might be:

1. What is going to happen to Bi-Tek for this mistake?
2. What are they going to do at Johnston County to make sure this never happens again?
3. Will Google be motivated to create a special "Oops! I posted my credit card number on a bulletin board!" call center?
4. Should software companies that handle sensitive banking, tax, and accounting data have to be certified? And, would an incident like this revoke the license of such a company? Should they ever get it back?
   

If you pay taxes in Johnston County, North Carolina you should be concerned about the security of your tax information and you should be asking questions about Bi-Tek, Johnston County's website, and what they are doing to safe guard your personal information that they have stewardship over.

Direct Web Remoting

DWR (Direct Web Remoting) is yet another Ajax framework. This one is, however, a Java framework that makes a heck of a lot of sense for java developers. Take a POJO. Register it in the dwr.xml file under WEB-INF in your war... and now you have an object you can call from your webpages.

Yeah. I didn't believe it either. But the 2.0 beta of DWR that I have been working with is really just about that easy. DWR generates the javascript which you just include in a page, then it generates the servlet that the javascript calls. DWR turns a POJO into an Ajax servlet.

See how easy it is to get started with DWR and if I get enough feed back I'll post some code samples of how to do a portlet that has can process actions using that POJO you registered with DWR. Now with some very simple (but smart) scripting you get Ajax features that automatically degrade to universally supported portlet actions.

And that is why DWR is head and shoulders over some very wrong-headed attempts to turn Ajax web development into Swing or pseudo-swing development. The web is the web. Features should degrade gracefully and page designers and artists should be able to work with programmers to create web applications that work well, look nice, and degrade gracefully.

see also: my DWR tag roll on del.icio.us

Open Source the Inevitable

Anyone who didn't see open source coming was just kidding themselves about what software is fundamentally. Software is speech. Software is the embodiment of ideas. Once an idea is born it spreads.

Patent law used to recognize this truth. After all, an invention is an idea given substance. The limited monopoly power granted by a patent is intended to fade in time. And, after a time the idea behind an invention becomes part of the greater matrix of ideas that create the culture and community of inventors.

Eventually, enough time will pass that the novelty of every software "invention" will fade and the ideas that drive those inventions will become part of the greater fabric of the community of software creators. Open source is one method of speeding up this process. By forcing software to expose its inner working you forcibly populate the world with the thoughts and ideas that were used to create the software.

Closed source software spreads its thoughts and ideas much more slowly. So much more slowly that the thoughts and ideas the pervade the open source community will eventually over power the closed source community's ideas. In this way open source is guaranteed victory over closed mind-sets... But, not necessarily economic victory.

In the arena of "hearts and minds" victory by open source is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary. Victory for open source in this arena is not the destruction of a particular company, it is the change of the company. Open source is just a label for a small part of a grander change coming for humanity.

The expression ideas is slowly becoming divorced from the physical world. In time the only thing that will have value are thoughts and ideas. Ideas have no value or power until they are shared. Open source is about sharing thoughts and ideas. And, our future is more about the power of thoughts and ideas than it is about control of resources.

Requirements

I usually ask candidates for Software Engineer positions the following questions about their project work:

How do you know when you are done?
How do you know when you have succeeded?

Server as a Text Pump

So a server gets requests from the network and these come as text. A server gives a response and these are formulated as text. The text is formatted to give it a structure. And, if you use the right formats you get to call your server an XML-RPC server, or a SOAP server, or flavor of the week. Isn't all this just the Unix Philosophy taken to the web and hammered on with an XML hammer?

And, this is the point where I start wondering why the heck so many freakin'' book get written about this. SOA should be the easiest thing in the world. Unix programs have been parsing and spewing forth text for ever why does it suddenly become so much more difficult once you put objects into the mix?

It's the frameworks. Many of these XML frameworks don't make life simpler, they make it more complex. If you're trying to do SOAP or any XML-RPC work in a Java Application Server I encourage you to look at JBoss' EJB3 product. It looks to me like EJB3 in general will save a lot of grief for SOAP-y programmers and the JBossWS API is the first implementation of this that I've found usable.

When I tried some of the WebService tricks on the Sun Application server that comes with NetBeans I sprained a nerve cluster. When I tried the same on Glassfish I lost a lobe. With JBossWS I was so shocked at how easily my EJB3 service went together I couldn't believe it. I've made EJB3 + JBossWS my default development stack for Web Services.

No job shortage here?

We've been interviewing candidates for an open Software Engineering position for the last year. It averages about one interview a month and so far we can't find qualified candidates. Some of the more frustrating candidates interview well but when you get to technical questions you can't get the feeling that they themselves are comfortable with the technical subject matter. At least once someone passed technical, got hired, and had to be "let go" because it soon became apparent that they had "studied" for the interview but had no practical experience... And had lied on their resume.

I'm really puzzled by the fresh faced BSCS who has never taken data structures. I asked him which university he attended and I have to say that if this is the quality of education at that name-brand university I'll take my employer's business elsewhere. I would expect that BSCS students would either learn theory or learn practical skills to an appreciable degree.

Where are all the qualified candidates that were complaining about jobs going to India? Could you tell me where they are? I can't find them.

Bit Plumber

It seems that most of my life is spent either waiting for, calling new, or building data transfers. I spend my Monday morning reviewing logs from the previous weekend's data transfers, I start a refresh of my development environment's database, and I work through last week's progress on the web services I created. This weeks project is to design a custom export of data from one database to an XML format and back into a different database. So much of this is repetitive and so much of it is the same from week to week I have to wonder if there isn't a group of tools to automate these tasks.

Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of ETL tools. These are tools that Extract, Transform, and Load data. In short they have the potential to replace an entire stack of SOA tools that currently are written painstakingly entity by entity by your talented Web Service programmers. They do all their by work by pragmatically by-passing the entire ORM process (that then demands you to Serialize the Objects to get XML) and skip directly to the XML.

I expect to see more applications built around these ideas as SOA catches on more. Why can't an ETL be used to generate Ajax messages or SOAP calls? After all aren't many SOAP calls and Ajax calls just loading up data from a database and transforming it into the right message format?