Dear Twitter,

If you are going to return different JSON in your RESTful services, please tell your users in advance.

....

Versioning and life cycle management of your services is crucial for clients.  Developers of Twitter based applications are quite aware of this.  Once again, Twitter changed the JSON response of some RESTful services at the usual time of 8PM PST.  Of course, it broke our popular Twitter application.   Twitter's RESTful services often change at a whim (not the actual call, but the format of the JSON response)

The cost?  Development time to track down this unanticipated problem.  But mostly, a usability cost (as in potential lost new users) as our application was not properly updating over night until we fixed the issue.
.....

The moral of the story for all Web Service developers is that the versioning of your services is crucial and should be a part of service deployment from the start.

CA has acquired Oblicore, which has built service-level management technology.   CA wants to develop service management capabilities for customers looking to manage cloud computing environments.  Oblicore is known for their real time service performance monitoring.  It's a good buy for CA.  

Microsoft, lagging far behind IBM and Oracle (excluding Sharepoint, often used for the SOA consumer), is starting a cloud computing unit. MSFT should have done this long ago, but I believe MSFT will need to make a few major acquisitions to compete with IBM and Oracle. Microsoft to start SOA unit

Twitter has been hacked again.. It's another black eye for Twitter's security and overall reliability. Twitter's problems should be a lesson for all SOA providers. While Twitter's data is likely limited to e-mail accounts, secure services often have critical data that can be compromised. SOA, in addition to the usual security issues, has addition security risks such as replay attacks.

Error handling is an important component of error handling that is often ignored at design time. As an example, the Twitter REST API sometimes does not have enough useful information to give back to the user. Worse, some requests that should return JSON return HTML on an error. If you are requesting JSON, the error results should also be in JSON. Bad error handling places an undue burden on client applications and hurt your services. My company has developed a Twitter app which was delayed due to these types of issues.

Have a need for a SOA expert in Washington DC?  Send me a DM or e-mail; I know of a top notch consultant who will be on the market soon.

I have been dissecting popular Web 2.0 REST-based Web Services in building a new site that should (hopefully) prove to be popular. It's my second major site launch, the first one being acquired by a Microsoft funded startup years ago. I will reveal more details after the launch, but I've become both more and less of a fan of REST as a result of this exercise. REST is, of course, easy to use. But the problems with data accuracy have been frustrating.

While Google and Microsoft are taking aim at the consumer online document space, Oracle wants to target business users. Oracle is considering building a service enabling users to create and share documents in WebEx meeting/collaboration service. Google has failed to gain traction among businesses with their online document sharing. It's not surprising, given slow performance and a defect which made private documents publicly viewable.