A Passel of Interesting Links: Web 2.0, Mashups, Ruby on Rails, JSON, Ajax, and more...

Here are some articles, tutorials, and blog postings that I've found useful, interesting, or thought-provoking so far this week:

• Web Services at a Crossroads - "Implemention strategies for Web services are splitting into two camps: building enterprise SOAs and exploiting Web technologies. Which is right for you?"
• Mashup Data Formats: JSON vs. XML - "It's not the latest sequel to the "Jason versus Freddie" movie, it's one of the decisions you need to make."
• State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs - "I often get quizzical looks when I tie agile methods together with Web 2.0 and even SOA. But they are actually highly interrelated, particularly on the Web 2.0 side."
• Why Mashups Matter - "Mash Ups Enable Customers to Creatively Consume Your Brand Experience."
• Update on SOA, Web 2.0, and Agile Methods - " Because Ajax is a sincerely compelling synthesis of the ubiquitous features found in the most popular Internet browsers is why."
• A Tale of Two Grids - "This computing model is useful if you are trying to analyze a bunch radio signals for intelligent life or render the next Pixar film, but for the 99% of us who just want have a simple piece of business logic available on the net somewhere, accessible to the rest of our services, its 100% useless."
• The SOA With Reach: Web-Oriented Architecture - "WOA is more of an emerging best practice from the battle-hardened folks building software on the Web than it is from ivory tower architects or the analyst group notebook."
• I Got Some REST This Week to go With My SOAP - "I’ve encouraged all of my portfolio companies that have an online service to supply both REST and SOAP API’s to their web services."
• The Long Tail is Chunky - "As you go down the long tail, you may lose sheer numbers of potential customers, but you will have an easier time actually reaching those customers."
• Rolling With Ruby on Rails - Part 1, Part 2, and a followup, Ajax on Rails - "Maybe you've heard about Ruby on Rails, the super productive new way to develop web applications, and you'd like to give it a try, but you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails."

These are all what I call DRM -- discardable reading material. Nice, handy articles to print out and carry around with you to fill up those spare moments when you are waiting for something to happen.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Andrew]

Jeff, those three Rails articles are *very* dated. They're basically still ok, but do contain instructions that may not pertain to the current version of Rails.

Unfortuanately, since the release of the "Agile Web Development with Rails" book, these sorts of quick intro tutorials to the framework have stopped appearing, which means that at the moment, there's not much on the web in the way of good, accurate, current tutorials for beginners.

[Jad madi]

My friend and I started new podcast and we decided to use S3 as first mirror.
http://www.jadmadi.net/2006/04/13/yemza3-saba7ak-7alga-ragam-wa7ad/