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Creating a website using a blogging tool: WordPress or Movable Type?

My corporate website is pretty minimalist, since I’m a one-person consulting shop and most of my good stuff is here on my blog. However, I’d like to redesign the site to be a bit more dynamic, and I’m thinking of using a blogging tool to do the entire site, although I intend to leave my blog here on ebizQ where I’m part of an integration community.

My site is hosted with Yahoo! small business services, which offers me WordPress or Movable Type preinstalled, and I’m looking for any advice on which makes a better website creation tool. Any comments?

I have a bit more experience with Movable Type since I ended up rewriting most of the templates when I moved my blog over to ebizQ; I’ve used WordPress for blogging but never had to change templates or any other administrative tasks. However, as an old coder, I don’t think that I’m going to have a problem learning enough about either one to do something interesting.

SaaS versus shared services

Lots of interesting things swirling around about SaaS lately, including the relationship to shared services within an organization. James Governer posted about the convergence of shared services and business process outsourcing, but I have a bit of a problem with comparing an internal mandated service with an external service about which you have a choice. As I said in my comment on James’ post, the problem with equating shared services within an organization and a true outsourced SaaS is that an enterprise is usually captive to its shared services, whereas they have a choice with an external SaaS.

Then Richard Veryard posted about “Open Sauce”, which completely cracked me up, referring to an earlier Seth Godin post about Tabasco, and making a SaaS analogy:

Imagine there was a delivery mechanism that allowed people to buy a single shot of Tabasco on-demand. Imagine there was a social mechanism that allowed people to share bottles of Tabasco (and many other flavours) with their neighbours.

Having seen these three posts in succession, I started thinking about the shared services analogy: similar to Veryard’s SaaS one, except that your older brother owns all the bottles of hot sauce, and your mom makes you buy from him rather than the kid in the next block. If your brother’s taste is the same as yours, that’s great for you; if it’s not, then he comes off like a bit of a tyrant. If you don’t like his taste and choose not to have hot sauce, then he still justifies his existence because he’s still the household standard, there’s just less hot sauce used and your life is duller because of it.

Tracking comments with co.mments

I’ve been doing a lot of commenting on other people’s blogs lately, and using co.mments to track the conversations. It’s easy, just setup an account, install the bookmarklet in your browser, then when you’re on a page where you want to track the changes, just click on the bookmarklet and co.mments will pop up to tell you that it is tracking the conversation. Works even if the blog doesn’t have a comments feed, and also works even if you forget until after you’ve posted your comment (which was a problem with CoComment). In fact, you can go back to the post at any time and invoke co.mments. You can, of course, get the results as an RSS feed too.

Easy enough for Mom

There’s been a bit of a backlash lately about saying that some new technology is “easy enough for my mom to use” as if it denigrates women. However, when I use that phrase, I mean it quite literally: my mom turned 83 today, and for the past 15 years or so, I’ve been introducing her (and my dad) to more technology than they ever imagined possible, to the point where email and the internet are a daily part of their lives. At Christmas, she overheard me talking about my blog, and she asked what a blog was. I sent her a link to Steve Garfield‘s 80-year-old mother’s blog as an example, and two weeks later she sent me the inevitable email:

As you know my computer skills are not too good but thought that learning how to blog might be fun. Can you send something about how to do this?

Today, she blogged about turning 83, the problems with their local hospital’s IVR system, and a variety of other topics. If you have a minute, pop over there and add a “Happy Birthday” comment; just say that you know me and heard that it was her birthday, so that she’s not wondering why strangers are sending her email — her comments are auto-emailed to her, and she’s still a bit confused about that particular piece of the technology.

Update: tell her where you’re commenting from, she still can’t believe that anyone outside her neighbourhood reads her blog.

SOA 2-point-uh-oh

The first bit of David Linthicum‘s podcast today covers the SOA 2.0 naming nonsense, calling it “disingenuous” and a “land grab”, and pointing out that it will cause more confusion. Yesterday, I linked to Macehiter Ward-Dutton’s Stop the Madness petition to protest the use of the term SOA 2.0. Since then, Loek Bakker and I have been having a conversation about it.

To quote a comment that I put on Loek’s post, I’m assuming that the two Neils are being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the petition, and are using it more to raise awareness of the silliness of versioning a concept. Regardless, head over there and sign it as a strike against meaningless marketing-enabled terminology worldwide!

Update: I forgot to link to James Governor’s post, which links to several others that share this opinion on SOA 2.0, and on to their links, and so on.

SOA in OMG newsletter

The Spring OMG newsletter is available online (direct link to PDF) with a 2-page article “OMG and Service-Oriented Architecture”:

In essence, SOA is an architectural approach that seeks to align business processes with service protocols and the underlying software components and legacy applications that implement them.

So far, so good. Then they go on to say:

Both processes and services need to be carefully coordinated to assure an effective SOA implementation. You can’t really do SOA without a clear model of the business process to be supported.

Not sure that I fully agree with that: you have to have a clear model of your business process before you can implement SOA? Aren’t the underlying services supposed to be reusable even if the business process changes? Isn’t that really the whole point of SOA?

And you can’t link your business processes to your service models without the modeling standards the OMG is developing as part of its Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®).

Oh, I get it now.

They do include a nice diagram showing where the OMG standards fit in one representation of an SOA environment (see the newsletter for the full-size version). You can see where BPMN, BPDM and BPEL fit in, which I talked about in my posts from the BPM Think Tank last week, plus other standards such as SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) for business rules.

I also like that they’re platform-independent about this, and that they don’t equate SOA with WS-*.

You can check out the newly-formed OMG SIG on SOA if you want to get involved in discussing this MDA approach to SOA.

Irreversibility breeds complexity

This is brilliant: an article by Martin Fowler in IEEE Software magazine from a few years back (via Julian On Software) really nails the issue of agility and complexity by referencing, oddly enough, a speech given by economist Enrico Zaninotto at the XP 2002 conference. Fowler says:

One aspect I found particularly interesting was his [Zaninotto’s] comment that irreversibility was one of the prime drivers of complexity. He saw agile methods, in manufacturing and software development, as a shift that seeks to contain complexity by reducing irreversibility — as opposed to tackling other complexity drivers. I think that one of an architect’s most important tasks is to remove architecture by finding ways to eliminate irreversibility in software designs.

Most of my customers are large financial and insurance organizations that still use very waterfall methods for development. The requirements and functional design take months to develop, and have concrete poured firmly over them as soon as they are complete. In other words, the irreversibility starts at the requirements stage, long before development even starts. Of course, since a technical design follows the requirements stage and in turn is solidified before development begins, the irreversibilty is built into this stage as well: any changes have to go back through (potentially) several layers of approval and redesign, which impacts project schedules and contracts.

Fowler referenced an example where a database administrator made it easy to change the database schema and migrate the data for a project; as Fowler put it, “the database schema is no longer architectural” since it could be changed on the fly to accommodate the requirements of the project, rather than being a pre-supposed part of the design.

When we used to do this, it was called “coding by the seat of our pants”; now it’s Agile!

Stop the SOA 2.0 bull

I’m with the Neils, Brenda, Ronan and David on this one: stop the meaningless “numbering” of an architectural philosophy that is being perpetrated primarily by Oracle and Gartner. Sign the SOA 2.0? No thanks petition:

We’ve created this online petition because we’re dumbfounded at the attempt by certain parts of the IT industry to create and give weight to the term “SOA 2.0”.

Industry does not, at this point, need more confusion around SOA. SOA has real value, but industry at large is only just coming to terms with what it means and what it can do. Inventing terms like “SOA 2.0” might help some analysts and vendors make money, but overall, in the long run it damages us all.

Consider that a big vendor and a big analyst started all this SOA 2.0 nonsense, and you can be pretty sure that their motives are not altruistic. And considering the trademark nonsense that just happened over Web 2.0, lawsuits probably aren’t far behind either.

An online petition on its own may not hold much weight, but if you have a blog, then blog about it; if you’re a customer of Oracle or Gartner, let them know what you think. If the market rejects the concept of SOA 2.0 as so much marketing bull, it won’t fly.

BPM Think Tank wrapup

Since I only finished posting about yesterday’s sessions at the end of this morning, I decided to just do a final conference wrapup instead of separate wrapups for yesterday and today.

In general, the BPM Think Tank was great, and I’ll definitely attend again in the future. I learned a lot about some of the standards that I didn’t know much about before (like BPDM), and met some really smart people with lots of opinions on the topic of standards. It’s been so long since I was involved in any sort of standards work (AIIM in the early 90’s, and topographic data interchange formats for the Canadian Council of Surveying and Mapping back in the late 80’s), and I had forgotten about both the frustrations of dealing with standards committees and the excitement of being able to contribute to a little bit of computing history that will make things work better for a lot of people.

I’m still mulling over the XPDL/BPDM conundrum (and, to a lesser extent, BPEL), but the fact that different standards bodies are all here participating is a good indicator that there is the collective will to head off problems like this. At last year’s Think Tank, discussions between BPMI and OMG around the competing graphical process models of BPMN and UML activity diagrams helped lead to the absorption of BPMI into OMG, and the championing of a single standard, BPMN, being put forward by the merged organization. We can only hope that something similar will happen with XPDL and BPDM in order to avoid future problems in the BPMN serialization domain.

I had the chance to meet several people who I had connected with online but never met face-to-face: Dana Morris of OMG, Bruce Silver, John Evdemon (who I’ll be having ongoing discussions with about BPM and Web 2.0) and others. Jeanne Baker, who did such a great job at keeping things moving along during the sessions, even remembered one of my posts from last year about a webinar that she gave on standards — she turned to me at lunch yesterday and asked “Did you write that blog post called ‘Alphabet soup for lunch‘?” — proof that people will remember if you mention them in print. I missed other people completely in the crowd (Phil, where were you?).

There were a few logistical problems (conference rooms way too cold, no free wifi, not enough herbal tea, and no free t-shirts with vendor logos, about which I heard a lot of whining when I got home), but these were only minor annoyances in an otherwise well-executed conference with excellent content.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: BPDM technology roundtable

The last of the four roundtables that I attended was on BPDM, led by Fred Cummins. I started with my (by now) usual question about the distinctions and overlap between XPDL and BPDM: his response was that XPDL is an XML specification, and BPDM is a metamodel that can be exported to XML via XMI. He seemed to imply that they could coexist, but given that BPDM will include a serialization specification for BPMN (in addition to other models that can be represented in BPDM), I’m not sure I see the need for both in the standards world. He later stated that there is an expectation that people will model in BPDM (as visualized by BPMN or other visualizations as appropriate) and transform to an execution language such as BPEL, rather than BPDM being an interchange format; this seems to leave no room in the landscape for XPDL if you adopt BPDM, unless you need it as a legacy interchange format.

Moving on to other points about BPDM, it will include both orchestration and choreography (process flow, messages and collaboration), and will include more concepts than can be represented in BPMN, hence will support other views, e.g., process dependency diagrams, roles/organization view, choreography. A draft submission of the standard is due on June 5th, with a rough plan to finalize the underpinnings to provide BPMN support within 3-4 months, although there is no plan to issue a version with just the serialization as a preliminary release. In order to complete the release, they will likely do BPEL export from BPDM and a UML mapping to BPDM in order to demonstrate usability of the standard on a broad enough basis to initiate its acceptance.

When Cummins provided a summary of all of his roundtables at the end of the conference, he pointed out a couple of questions that had arisen during the discussions:

Is there a potential for executable BPDM? [I say that if there can be abstract BPEL then why not executable BPDM?]
Is there a way to achieve compatibility between XPDL and BPDM? [I think that there better be]