Engwar

SOA Governance by Todd Biske is surprisingly an easy read that explain what is governance and what does it mean in an SOA setting. It begins with a comprehensive introduction to governance and the three main important aspects, people, policies and processes. Then, he explains how to introduce SOA into existing project governance efforts. After describing the core concepts, Todd goes on to explain how most enterprises fall into the trap of creating a bunch of services and calling it SOA. How to approach the problem with defined goals when trying to adopt a service oriented architecture is clearly explained. I found it quite natural and easy to follow they style of the information presented where Todd tries to create a discussion among people in a virtual corporation. I think this makes it easy to relate the problems of a similar, real organization.

The chapter describing the role of governance during the analysis phase of a project was an eye opener for me because I had this wrong impression that SOA governance applied only to the components that is used in a service oriented architecture. This, as I later found out, called run time governance where you monitor the services to ensure they consistently deliver according to the governing policies and metric collection process for each and every service. In the chapter that’s dedicated to run time governance, Todd describe how to define provider/consumer baselines and how to manage them.

After guiding the reader through all the aspects of SOA governance, what should be done and how you should go about doing those, Todd paints a picture of what does it look like when you have implemented all these steps successfully. Then he explains how one can implement SOA governance in his/her organization along with some common challenges that one might face.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this wonderfully well written book about SOA governance. You can read a sample chapter about service versioning here.

If you’ve read the architectural notes about RESTful applications and want to get your hands dirty writing one quickly, RESTful PHP Web Services by Samisa Abeysinghe is a book you should read. It starts with an introduction to what REST is and surrounding technologies. Since many web applications today expose their functions as RESTful APIs, you’ll be better prepared to play around with these after reading this book. Also a simple application that explains all the necessary functions for developing a RESTful application is discussed.

Introduction gives the reader a head start about what REST is all about and tools needed to play with RESTful web services. Then PHP libraries and function used for talking to a REST service is explained. How CURL is used to send requests with various HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE are explained with examples. After getting an XML response from a service, PHP libraries for manipulating XML and extracting parts of data you want is illustrated with samples. One could directly copy and paste these codes and try it out as they read along. Then the author goes on to explain how to use Flickr with PHP using CURL. If you’ve been using a high level library that insulate the lower level details, this example shows some of the basic API calls and how to use them.

After explaining a mashup of BBC news feed and Yahoo search API, author explains how to design RESTful services. This is carried out along with the simple but complete example of a library system. How to provide a service as well as consuming that using PHP and CURL is explained with complete code samples. Then he explains how to design the same thing using the Zend Framework.

The book concludes with a chapter dedicated to debugging REST web services. Using the TCPMon tool to capture messages and look for possible errors. The chapter ends with a set of best practices that everyone should be aware of if you do any programming with REST web services. The book also mentions WSF/PHP as an advanced framework providing many more functionality amidst of acting as a REST framework. I highly recommend this book if you’re a PHP programmer waiting to get your hands dirty designing RESTful applications. To whet your appetite here’s a sample chapter from the book about designing and implementing resource oriented clients. Enjoy!

I’ve been using a Nokia N78 for couple of days now and it feels great. The biggest barrier in the very first couple of days was the lack of touch screen. I’ve been touching the icons and wondering why nothing happened, almost restarted the phone This will be like a mini review about the phone. Please bare with me for the references to HTC Touch ‘cos that’s what I’ve been using for quite sometime.

Form factor. First of all, given the width and height of the phone I quite liked the candy-bar form factor. No fugly qwerty maps. Relief. Feel comfortable in the hand too, unlike the N95, which IMO is a bit bulky. In the back there’s no protective cover in the housing over the camera. This has been the case with HTC Touch as well but they have a nice cover to put the phone on. Likewise, you might not wanna use this phone without a pouch unless you’re ok with scratches.

Keypad. Housing doesn’t feel great compared to other models, specially given my previous HTC Touch experience. For example it’s not easy to press the end key. Even if you do manage to press this, sometimes it has pressed the right selection key instead. This can get annoying. Ditto for left selection key and the call key. Rest of the keys are ok, but compared with the keypad designs in N95, it’s doesn’t feel natural when composing a text message/email.

Camera. N78 comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera which gives quite decent picture quality. Heck, my old digital camera is a 3.2 megapixel one. The phone has 3G so you it does have 2 cameras. Install vigo and you can transform your phone as a wireless web cam.

GPS. Phone comes with integrated GPS which you could use to do all that GPS jazz with maps etc… Also it has A-GPS support which gives you more accurate results.

Radio. It’s nice to have a radio on the phone so that you could tune into house music on local radio channels when you’re in a situation where you can hear horrendous music in the background In addition to the visual radio, you could listen to a large number of online radio stations.

FM transmitter. One cool feature of N78 is the built-in FM transmitter. You could play a song and then transmit on a frequency of your choice. Didn’t quite check the exact distance but the receiver was able to play quite nicely when the phone is about 10 meters away. No more burning of podcasts into CDs to listen while you’re driving. Just tune in and listen to stuff playing on your phone!

Storage. Comes with 90MB of RAM, 76MB of phone memory and a 2GB microSD card. Quite enough for the podcasts, indie music plus some techno.

WiFi. I’m really happy that the device has wireless. So there’s the option of being always connected without having to run your mobile phone bill sky high. Works seemlessly with access points with WEP+hidden ESSID.

3.5G. You can enjoy HSDPA speeds upto 3.6Mbps with Nokia N78. I just enabled dual mode, and enjoying 3.5G HSDPA with my Dialog connection. Armed with the webkit based browser, life cannot get any better

Message reader. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there’s message reader. Which reads out your SMSes and emails at a surprising rate of accuracy. It was nice to hear it reading xyz LKR as xyz Sri Lankan Rupees.

Navi Wheel. This is another really cool feature where you could scroll by touching the outset of the ok button in clockwise/anti-clockwise direction. This doesn’t work for all the menus though.

Apologies for not having any screenshots. For the life of me, I can’t seem to get either Best Screen Snap or Screenshot to work.