Timothy Dyck

Adoption of SOAP 1.1 has been so fast and so broad that the World Wide Web Consortium standard can almost be viewed as a synonym for Web services. After two and a half years of development work, the follow-on version of Simple Object Access Protocol, 1.2, is almost complete. SOAP 1.2 thoroughly scrubs SOAP 1.1, […]

On March 14, a 20-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin was charged by federal authorities in connection with an attack at the university, where the Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 55,200 people were illegally retrieved. The attack highlights some subtle issues that all security administrators should be considering. […]

A new package from Sanctum, released in March, will help active server pages .Net development teams catch security problems during the development process. AppScan Developer Edition 1.5—a new product despite the version number—is a customized version of the AppScan Web application security scanner I last reviewed in the middle of last year. Its been redesigned […]

As Web services become bigger pieces of an organizations technology infrastructure, the same kind of discipline that keeps core database servers and directory servers running at a reliability of four or five nines needs to be applied to Web services servers. If it cant be, then the technology cant be depended upon to deliver all […]

Web services technology has become the universal glue for keeping the pieces of large distributed systems together. Theres been tremendous progress on this front, and two cutting-edge tools from Systinet Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. push SOAP 1.1 just about as far as it can go. Systinets WASP (Web Applications and Services Platform) Server for […]

Microsoft Corp.s InfoPath beta provides a tool natively designed to provide a forms front end for XML data. As my colleague Jason Brooks notes, the tool is a Windows client application that requires a commitment to the latest Microsoft technologies. The usefulness of an XML forms client in an XML-centric environment is undeniable, but theres […]

BEA Systems has released a beta version of its free XML schema-to-Java class-mapping library and service. The service allows developers to bypass lower-level standard Java APIs for manipulating XML data and use a more object-oriented approach. Also different is that XMLBeans are based on XML Schema instead of Document Type Definition files. I submitted an […]

Mondays issue of Peter Neumanns Risks Digest highlighted a subtle security problem that is rarely discussed and probably slipping under the radar of most site administrators. Earlier this month, the University of Texas discovered that the Social Security numbers and other personal information of approximately 55,200 people had been illegally retrieved by an outside attacker. […]

Information is an organizations oxygen, and data is its memory. The not-so-easily-reached goals for an enterprise data architecture are managing information in ways that make it available to all those who can help the organization benefit from it (while keeping it private from others), maintaining accuracy in the data, and allowing data points to be […]

Expand Beyonds PocketDBA 2.0 provides database administrators with a lightweight, HTML-based administration console for on-the-move management. The previous version, 1.4, was an Oracle-only product, but PocketDBA 2.0 broadens users options by including modules for Microsofts SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 and for IBMs DB2 Universal Database 7.2. (SQL Server support started shipping in November, and […]