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Archive for July, 2006

Windows Workflow Foundation

In this article on searchwebservices.com Daniel Rubio shortly introduces the benefits of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) from Microsoft. He discusses the limitations of other orchestration technologies such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). For example:

But while BPEL provides the semantics and depth to orchestrate elaborate Web services scenarios, it's still relegated to a niche status confined to the services world. If you ponder the aspect of creating workflows strictly from services, you will arrive at the very realistic conclusion that workflows in many enterprises require the integration of non-serviceable legacy applications or even non-system human tasks, workflows that would fall beyond the scope of BPEL or any other orchestration technique currently applicable to SOA.

Daniel Rubio also highlights the possibility to embed WF in any desktop application like Office instead of on the server because of the lightweight/embeddable design of WF.

WF is strongly connected to Microsoft BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which is Microsoft's coming building blocks for service-oriented architectures.

You can also see two related articles from Daniel Rubio on searchwebservices.com: WCF: Microsoft's 'newest' services way and BizTalk Server: Microsoft's SOA building block.


It-uddannelserne har et image-problem

Computerworld skrev igår denne artikel om at it-uddannelserne i Danmark har et image problem og at der bliver optaget færre studerende på en række uddannelser bl.a. datalogi studiet. Udannelserne skal nu have flere kvinder, mindre kode-tænkning og flere kombinationer med andre fag. Computerworld gik faktisk helt amok igår og skrev ikke mindre end 4 artikler om problemer med it-uddannelserne. Der er et problem fordi:

En meget stor del af de danske it-virksomheder har nemlig for tiden problemer med at rekruttere det nødvendige antal højt-uddannede it-folk.

Danmark skal altså have flere højt-uddannede it-folk. De vil have at uddannelserne skal have mere fokus på anvendelsesmuligheder, flere kvinder og et generelt bedre image, og ikke fokusere så meget på programmering som tidligere. Udtalelser som disse er lidt skræmmende:

Vi er jo nødt til at kigge på, hvad der interesserer kvinderne, for vi skal have flere af dem ind.

Uddannelserne bør være langt mere anvendelses-orienterede - for eksempel ved at kombinere it og sundhed, it og innovation eller it og design og mange andre ting, siger John Sarborg Pedersen.

Ja, men hvad hjælper det at tiltrække flere studerende, heriblandt kvinder, hvis man propper uddannelserne med alle mulige fag som virksomhederne reelt ikke efterspørger. Det er jo de højt-uddannede folk de mangler! I min verden er det folk som reelt kan noget, ikke en flok generalister som kun har skrabet overfladen af mange af fagene.

IT-Universitetet (ITU) bliver fremhævet som et eksempel på en uddannelses-institution, der faktisk har evnet at løfte opgaven.

Det skyldes ikke mindst, at det på mange af it-uddannelserne på ITU står tydeligt, hvad uddannelsen kan bruges til. Og det er noget, som de unge kan lide.

Ja, ITU har også en masse flotte kommende jobtitler i deres beskrivelse af uddannelserne. Men hvad man kan når man er færdig har altså rigtig meget at gøre med, hvilke kurser man vælger. Og der er efter min mening mange som vælger for lette kurser - og faktisk vælger kurser som indeholder samme stof og niveau som på deres tidligere bachelor uddannelse. Virksomhederne har rigtigt nok brug for højt-uddannede it-folk, og det er man jo som cand.it'er, men man skal jo også kunne noget som tilsvarer sin titel.


GUI Editor for Google Web Toolkit

Wirelexsoft has announced an Eclipse-based visual GUI editor for Google Web Toolkit (GWT) called VistaFei. With VistaFei GWT UI’s can be built using drag and drop from a Palette controls and WYSIWYG editing area. You can watch a demo video and tutorial at Wirelexsoft’s site or read the original post at InfoQ.com.

14 dage til termin

Idag er der 14 dage til Tones termin den 2. august. Nu er vi begyndt at blive lidt utålmodige, fordi alting er på plads og fødslen ligeså godt kunne gå igang nu. Vi er ved at være lidt spændte og glæder os til at se vores baby :-)

Ruby plug-in for Visual Studio

It seems like people really wants to take open-source technologies and frameworks and make plug-ins for Visual Studio. In this post I mentioned a MySQL plug-in for Visual Studio. Now there is a commercial plug-in called “Ruby in Steel” on its way. The plug-in developed by the Sapphire In Steel project will give enterprise users a familiar environment for working with Ruby files and Ruby on Rails projects.

It seems like a great thing to get an IDE for RoR. I got a little scared of the productivity of RoR when i saw a fellow student working with RoR on a Linux machine with tons of different command-line windows open. That didn’t look really interesting to me cause i’m used to the nice features of Visual Studio and Eclipse. Actually there is also an Eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails called RadRails. The RadRails tools are also available as Eclipse plug-ins.

Free book: Mastering EJB 3.0

A few days ago TheServerSide.com announced the release of ”Mastering EJB” in its 4th edition. The book is updated to EJB 3.0 and has around 50% new and revised material. The book includes an in-depth coverage of the Java Persistence API and how to use POJO entities with EJB. You can read more about the book and the contents at this link or go directly to their download page to get the free PDF.

MySQL Visual Studio plug-in

According to this link MySQL AB has joined the Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) program and is now developing a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005. It will allow Windows developers to build MySQL data-driven applications from within Visual Studio. From MySQL ABs press release:

With this plug-in, developers will be able to create, modify and manage MySQL database objects with an easy-to-use interface from within the Visual Studio IDE.

That’s nice I think. But according to this comment they should have used their time to update their data provider to support more of the ADO.NET 2.0 features and the MSDTC (Microsoft Distrubuted Transaction Coordinator).

Database Schema Samples Library

I just wanted to share a link I found in this post in Scott Guthrie’s blog. It’s a Library of Free Data Models that includes hundreds of sample database schemas for tons of topics or problem areas. Maybe you could get ideas for your next project on how to structure the database according to the problem area at hand??

Just started blogging

Finally started blogging…. Don’t expect too much though! I hope to write something here once in a while about software and web development, my studies at ITU, my personal life and family.

N.B. Some of this blog will be in Danish and some in English due to different target audience.