O'reilly benchnarking XML parsers

O'reilly published results on XML parser benchmarks that they did:

Quote: "Our intention was to find the right components for our high performance web service security gateway, so that it could be run on a small dedicated appliance. The limited resources of such a device brought the C tests into the game, since the Java virtual machine already needs a lot of memory. Object model parsers are the most important parser types in the context of web service security because they can be used to alter a XML document in memory."

See:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/09/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-1.html

and

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/05/16/xml-parser-benchmarks-part-2.html

Frank Mantec on XTech 2007: ``SOAP is a dead duck in the www''

I attended Frank Mantec's (Google inc.) talk today at XTech 2007 on Google Data API (see: http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/33). He had made a very surprising claim:

"SOAP is a dead duck in the www"

And he said it as someone who worked for Microsoft for years and developed from scratched the WSDL. He was saying that interoperability across programming languages that are not from the same vendor (e.g., .NET languages and Java) is close to non existing and that the chances that it will be easy to connect via SOAP across languages and vendors is 0.00something% chance to happen. He said that WSDL was and still is a BIG MISTAKE.

WOW!

Finally, I don't feel that I'm the only one who was not able to make C, .NET, Java and Perl talk SOAP together without ugly "magic" and some "voodoo"and though that the reason for that was WSDL...

All this happened when questions from the audience came asking how come ATOM and REST approach was used rather than SOAP for the Google Data API.

Pentax to be bought by Hoya?

I just heard on BBC news that Hoya are to buy Pentax.
see: http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200705170106.html

Some pictures I shot today in Paris

Here are a few shots I took this evening, sometime around 21:00-21:30.
You can probably notice the dirt on my caemra's sensor and also the rain drops on my lense, as I was taking these pictures while it was raining.