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SODA

A month or so ago, I was reading a Gartner handout for a conference, and came across an acronym they invented- SODA[1]. SODA (Service-Oriented Development of Applications), as Gartner defines it, consists of the following areas:

• Composition
• Adaptive process management
• Services-based interoperability and integration
• Discovery and description
• Rapid application maintenance
• mumble, mumble

I kept hoping that this one won't catch on, but no such luck! Vendors have rushed to clasp yet another acronym to their bosom, and RougeWave even announced how their LEIF framework participates in the SODA development process.

Frankly, this leaves me in two minds- I agree that formalizations in design and development processes is important; but the rate at which the acronym/specification-churn happens in the Web services/SOA world leaves me (and I'm sure a lot of others), with a feeling that a lot of stuff here is over-engineered and over-hyped. This, to no small extent, is why even after four years of Web services, we still have a lot of programmers very leery of it.

References:

[1] Gartner. Service-Oriented Development of Applications: SODA Pops. http://www.gartner.com/webletter/bowstreet/art5/art5.html

GMail's been adding new features..

In an earlier post, I had previewed gmail, and listed things that I liked, and what needs to be added. Well, since then much of it has been added.

• You can now import email addresses from other mail programs like Outlook, or web based email systems like Hotmail and Yahoo.
• There is a mail notifier now. Today there was a discussion on slashdot about Google trying to discourage third party mail notifiers. Wonder what's with that, especially since Microsoft is planning to open up this area, with a notification API in Longhorn for mail messages among other things.. Having to run separate notifiers clutters up the toolbar!
• Google explains why short user names (less than six characters) weren't allowed. Its to make automatic address generation less easy for spammers.

Some remaining quibbles:

• You dont have folders, and I haven't still got used to logging on to a page full of read mail. I like to deal with email and either delete it, or save it out of sight in a folder. I like to log on to page with new emails showing only. Oh well.
• Download still bring up an empty web page..
• Sending email from the contact list still pops up another window- it would be nice to not have multiple windows open up

Oh, and by the way, you can submit feedback to GMail here.

[Update: Aug 30, 2004] Seems you can move read email out of the way... by archiving it. The archived email shows up in searches and in the 'All mail' option, but not in the Inbox. Thanks a lot for the tip Kevin Dangoor!