Showing posts with label web services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web services. Show all posts

21 December 2010

Lessons from WikiLeaks: Decentralise, Decentralise, Decentralise

Whether or not Wikileaks turns out to be a watershed in politics, there's another question of more immediate interest to the open source world: can the latter learn a key lesson from the measures taken against the Wikileaks operation?

These have included booting it off Amazon's servers and stopping donations through MasterCard, Visa or PayPal. That this happened without warning serves as a timely reminder that such centralized services have absolute and largely arbitrary power over their users.

On The H Open.

26 April 2007

Wanted for WS-Context: Some Context

Sounds heavy:

OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved Web Services Context (WS-Context) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WS-Context defines an open framework for supporting coordinated and transactional compositions of multiple Web services applications.

But I wonder whether anyone will use it.

11 September 2006

Widgetification = Modularisation

An interesting piece by Om Malik (not on GigaOM) about the rise of the widget. But no surprise here really: the atomisation of programs is just another reflection of the tidal wave that is open source currently sweeping over programming in general. As I've written several times, modularity is key to free software's success: widgetification is simply the same idea applied to Web services.

07 March 2006

The Other Grid God: Open Source

As I was browsing through Lxer.com, my eye caught this rather wonderful headline: "Grid god to head up Chicago computing institute". The story explains that Ian Foster, one of the pioneers in the area of grid computing (and the grid god in question), is moving to the Computation Institute (great name - horrible Web site).

Grid computing refers to the seamless linking together across the Internet of physically separate computers to form a huge, virtual computer. It's an idea that I've been following for some time, not least because it's yet another area where free software trounces proprietary solutions.

The most popular toolkit for building grids comes from the Globus Alliance, and this is by far the best place to turn to find out about the subject. For example, there's a particularly good introduction to grid computing's background and the latest developments.

The section dealing with grid architecture notes that there is currently a convergence between grid computing and the whole idea of Web services. This is only logical, since one of the benefits of having a grid is that you can access Web services across it in a completely transparent way to create powerful virtual applications running on massive virtual hardware.

The Globus Alliance site is packed with other resources, including a FAQ, a huge list of research papers on grids and related topics, information about the Globus Toolkit, which lets you create grids, and the software itself.

Open source's leading position in the grid computing world complements a similar success in the related field of supercomputing. As this chart shows, over 50% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run GNU/Linux; significantly, Microsoft Windows does not even appear on the chart.

This total domination of top-end computing - be it grids or supercomputers - by open source is one of the facts that Microsoft somehow omits to tell us in its "Get The Facts" campaign.