a couple more news items

this is a case where crappy software patents hits close to home. the now-bankrupt CommerceOne auctioned off some software patents relating to Web Services technologies. there's another great description of this madness which points out "...Commerce One patented a method for using standardized electronic documents to automate the sale of goods and services over the Internet." stuff like this makes it very easy to agree with tearing out all software patent law. in all fairness, I should say I don't view CommerceOne as all that evil. they filed some ridiculous patents, sure...but they also gave away a lot of their 'IP' to the open-source community. I'm more afraid of this JGR Acquisitions group who paid $15.5 million and will be looking to make a profit, most likely from IP lawsuits.

in some good news, IBM created a cool Eclipse plugin for Web Services which supposedly allows a developer to more easily visualize and debug web service transactions, or at least, web services hosted on WebSphere! I've thought this would be an awesome feature for Zend Studio or for the php Eclipse plugin, but that's further down the road when apache/php are extended (by us?) to be very powerful web servicers.

today at the MySQL meetup, I presented the php5 code I wrote along with the webservice helper that created/published/hosted the WSDL enabling the code to be re-used anywhere with SOAP capabilities. I think it went over pretty well, but I still need to enhance the service by adding more couriers and consolidating the results into a single XML response. then I'll hopefully get a chance to show that to Mike G. from EDS, as he couldn't be at today's meetup.

nothing else.