Daily Archives: November 28, 2006

internet, software, software development

Salesforce.com: WS-* is dead

Today I spoke to Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing at Salesforce.com. His company has recently announced that during its third quarter, API transactions (driven by web services) surpassed CRM page views on its service for the first time. I asked Gross whether Salesforce.com would move towards the WS-* standards as its evolves its API.

“We’re very big advocates of SOAP and WSDL,” he told me.  “We’re probably the largest users of SOAP and WSDL in any business anywhere in the world. That said, my sense is that WS-* is dead. There is not a lot happening in WS-* that is being driven by customers and use cases, and there is not a lot that is being informed by what we’ve learned from “Web 2.0″. I question its relevance.”

How then will Salesforce.com solve problems like those which WS-* addresses, such as as reliable messaging? “If any part of WS-* has promise it’s reliable messaging, but I’ve been part of the web services technical community since late 2000. We’ve been talking about reliable messaging standards since then. That’s close to seven years. You have to wonder if the WS-* process is going to reach a meaningful conclusion.

“Instead, we’re going to see more organic innovation and best practices. There is no standard for AJAX. There is no standards body. It’s community-driven rather than vendor-driven, and that’s been very successful. I keep an open mind, but I think that WS-* and the people who are working on it need to start showing their relevance.”

software, windows

Mysterious Windows Vista hang explained

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Depressing post from Windows tech guru Mark Russinovich on The Case of the Delayed Windows Vista File Open Dialogs. In Windows Vista, whenever you use the File – Open dialog to browse your documents folder, the system attempts to display your full user name in a breadcrumb trail. In certain cases, this causes a delay of “between 5 to 15 seconds”, during which time your app will hang. The bad scenario is this:

  • Your computer is joined to a Windows domain
  • Your computer is attached to a network
  • The attached network does not provide a route to your domain controller

Example: your laptop is connected to a hotel wi-fi access point, and you don’t have a VPN open. Not uncommon.

Why depressing?

It’s depressing because this kind of thing is a poor user experience. It’s not only the hang; it’s that Windows provides no clue as to why you are waiting. If you are tech-savvy, you can even go into Task Manager, view the processes, and observe that nothing is busy; System Idle Process has 90% + of the CPU time. If you are really tech-savvy, you do what Russinovich did, but it’s not trivial to do so.

It’s depressing because Windows is trading the user’s time for the sake of prettification. Do you care whether the File – Open dialog has your full name in its address bar? No, you just want to open a document. But you do care that the app you are working with has hung, especially if the boss is looking over your shoulder and asking to see the figures in that Excel spreadsheet you are trying to open.

It’s depressing because it’s not a new problem. The detail is new, but I’ve noticed similar hangs in Windows before, in cases such as when you have a mapped drive letter to a location that is not available, or a share that no longer exists. Perhaps some of these are sorted in Vista, but this is just a new twist on an old issue.

The good news: maybe with Russinovich on board things like this will get fixed. But as he notes, not until Vista SP1 at the earliest.