Chris Schalk

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a hot topic among analysts, CIOs, and technology marketers, but the path from high-level architectural principles to programming a functioning, real-world service isn't always clear, especially since, in the end, you still need to create a clean user interface that's as flexible as the services it consumes. Why SOA? The concepts underlying SOA aren't a major divergence from standard design principles like abstraction, encapsulation, and reuse. To put it simply, SOA is a software architecture in which application functionality is encapsulated as independent services. These services are in many cases Web Services but can also be services derived from various technology types. Clients in different applications or business processes can then consume these services. More important, an SOA is designed to decouple the implementation of... (more)

My Experience at AJAXWorld 2006 in Santa Clara

"I enjoyed witnessing first hand the entrepreneurial spirit at its best at this show," writes Chris Schalk (pictured), in this candid account of attending AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, which was held last week in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley. A Java expert, Schalk has most recently been working with Oracle's AJAX support in its next generation ADF Faces rich client components. Read his account here in full. As I've been working with Oracle's AJAX support in its next generation ADF Faces rich client components I was fortunate enough to attend AJAX... (more)

Working with the Google AJAX Feed API

As you may know, one of the most compelling features of the Internet has been the explosion in the use of Internet feeds. Internet feeds serve as an extremely useful way to syndicate pure data in XML, as opposed to classical HTML Web pages where the data is intermixed with the user interface. Due to its simplicity, there are now literally millions of Internet feeds available with myriad data like the weather, news, and blogs. Historically the only downside was that interacting directly with Internet feed data was somewhat complex because you had to extract and parse the XML feed... (more)