IBM promoting SOA market with its patents

On the week of 12 July IBM continued to attempt to stimulate service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption by giving developers permission to use any IBM patent related to more than 150 Web services and SOA standards.

In the same manner that they promoted the use of the PC standard by giving away their intellectual knowledge IBM hopes to make themselves the standard for SOA implementation. The profit gained by patented rights will be overshadowed by customer asking for assistance in implementing SOA with IBM technology.

Baseportal web database

Continuing with the research on web databases I looked at Baseportal.

Developed and operated in germany since 1998 already more than 45,000 users. According to a press release the german upper house of parliament, deploy their webpages with baseportal.
It has more than 7.5 million pageviews per month.

Written in Perl the Baseportal program can run on UNIX/Linux/MacOSX as well as Windows9x/NT/2000. Furthermore, data can be transferred from one system to another.baseportal.com itself runs under Linux with Apache/mod_perl.

It is free to use with banners but a server liscence can be purchase for $300 to $1200.

SOA links to mainframe batch systems

Read an article found at http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1264415,00.html?track=sy80 describing the method for wrapping a legacy mainframe application with XML to allow it to play in the SOA world. The legacy application basically reads an XML file for its input and commands and produces another XML file for its output, which is then provided through the SOA wrapper.

SOA Repository

Listened to a podcast on SOA repositories. It explained how they work hand in hand with SOA services. Very good description of the relationship. The podcast can be found at http://media.techtarget.com/audioCast/APP_DEVELOPMENT/SOA_repository_6_18_2007_mixdown.mp3

After a quick search I found these as other Web databases:

• Trackvia
  Described as a web 2.0 style database application, according to a recent review they try to simplify the use of the web db so that a dba is not needed. It strives to provide only the features that most people use while removing complexity.
  You get a 14 day trial period at a $29 cost for first user and $5 for each additional user.
  WebOffice
  
  An web based office suite which provides more than the Microsoft Suite. The suite includes a document manager, an online calendar, web meetings, web mail, task manager, web database, discussion forum, contact list, expense reports, and polls.
  
  Since it is web based it will run on any platform with web access. It has a monthly cost of $60 per month for 5 users and offers a 30 day free trial period.
  
• Dataweb
  Wikipedia describes Dataweba as:
  The Dataweb is an open source project started in 1995 to provide access to statistical data in the same way that the current world wide web provides access to documents. The data browser for the DataWeb is Data FERRETT (Federated Electronic Research Review Extraction Tablulation Tool) The url for this work can be found at http://www.thedataweb.org.
  The Dataweb is a new approach to distributed data sharing that applies the proven REST architecture principles of the World Wide Web to the sharing and linking of machine-readable data across domains and applications. This architecture is being pursued by the OASIS XDI Technical Committee in development of the XDI trusted data sharing protocol. As a user, Dataweb provides access to all kinds of data. As a participant in TheDataWeb community, you can publish your data. It provides access to many public data subjects.

• Dabble DB
  
  Built in Smalltalk an object oriented programming language developed as a research project at Xerox. Users claim that is so easy to use they can develop an application in 5 minutes. It allows you to import data from a spreadsheet of database.
  
  The company provides free access for a commons account which allows the data to be publicly accessible. Usage is fairly inexpensive at $10 per month for a single user of $25 for a 5 user license.
  

In addition the following 5 will be discussed in a future entry.

• Baseportal
• BizDB
• PostgreSQL
• QuickBase
• Zoho

A New Learning Oportunity

I've always wanted to learn how to create web pages and here is my chance.

My problem is been that I need a reason to learn something. In the case of web pages I've wanted to create a page that will interface with a database. I'd like to use this blog to document my journey.

First step; select a technology. Being a dba I'd like to select the database first and see what works with that. Oracle, SQLServer and MySql immediately come to mind. There must be more....

First Blog

First blog created from the campus classroom as a test. Not sure what to use this blog for.