Semantic Web Fast, SOAP not that Slow and other links

* The Semantic Web In One Day "...syntactic aspects of data integration turned out to be tedious. Often, output from tool A can’t be used directly as input for tool B, although both have the same language capabilities. For example, both tools can handle RDF for input and output, but the resulting data is syntactically incompatible to the extent that the tools can’t communicate." Full article here.
* SOAP Performance Considered Really Rather Good points to a number of people studying the speed of SOAP. An intersting paper is "An Evaluation of Contemporary Commercial SOAP Implementations" which says that "SOAP and non-SOAP implementations continued to widen with .NET Remoting offering 280 msgs/sec at peak while most SOAP implementations were only handling from 30 to 60 msgs/sec. Even the leading Product A Document/Literal implementation only gave a maximum throughput of 67 msgs/sec. The two lowest performing RPC/Encoded implementations only handled 15 msgs/sec, the binary/TCP alternative." Not quite the "speed of light is the limiting factor".
* Secrets of the A-list bloggers: Technorati vs. Google "If Google favors indexing more popular sites more often, a clear opprtunity for world-live-web search engines like Technorati would be in the long tail of less-often-indexed sites but Technorati seems to ignore that opportunity and concentrate on the top sites. What that will translate into is a direct reproduction of the power laws when it comes to indexing of blogs."
* A conversation with Jeff Nielsen about agile software development "I was particularly interested to hear about Jeff's use of FIT, Ward Cunningham's Framework for Integrated Test. This technique first appeared on my radar in an outtake from our 2003 story on test-driven development. A more recent development is Fitnesse, a Wiki that supports the use of FIT... pains me to say so but, according to Jeff, XML-oriented tools have so far failed to cut the mustard in this environment." XML is not agile!
* Managing Component Dependencies Using ClassLoaders "Java's class loading mechanism allows for more elegant solutions to this problem. One such solution is for each component's authors to specify the dependencies of their component inside of its JAR manifest."