XMLDevCon - Scott Hanselman, Patrick Cauldwell
Work at Corillian
- Success defined as "25% of the people banking online use Corillian"
- All windows
- Voyager has evolved as an app server on windows when no app server existed on windows
- current 'api' is the familiar
string doit(string message)
Commerce server entirely latebound
Voyager has the same heavily late bound problem
- How to line up the dictionaries
- Voyager has it's own templating language
- Need a defined contract between the front end and back end of Voyager
- Discovered data typing problems
- Want a strongly typed language to support 'Mort' in the banks and at corillian -- middle of the bell curve
- 'Voyager does a pretty good job of
Highly scalable - 70,000 concurrent sessions and 1400-1500 requests/second
Does two levels of business tier load balancing
[Let me add some context: I am sitting directly behind Kurt Cagel. To his left is Sam Ruby]
Very weak contract has wasted many, many hours of development
Current contracts are defined in word docs, wanted a declarative xml schema that "has more teeth."
Scott's mastery of his presentation. esp. Notepad 2 + zooming is a beautiful thing to see.
Found performance problems in having headers due to seeking for soap:faults (I've always wondered why there wasn't a header for faults),
so they have their own header rather than leveraging soap -- why not just use the extensibility mechanisms of soap??
Don asks "Why an api versus an XML DSL?" (paraphrased)
"I love selling software, it's a fantastic endeavor, but..." -- Don
They use CruiseControl.NET to do basically everything from build deploy test to comprehensive documentation
'The schema is not the point. The CONTRACT is the point."
All of the doc is driven by the
Kurt Cagel: "What do your lawyers think about the schema as a legal contract?"
The bank usually cares most about the UI spec.
Coming in the future: schematron support (commentary - schematron rocks, looking forward to Daniel Cazzu's schematron talk)
Coming in the future's future: BPEL
Goal: eliminate repetitive coding
Has a 'Tivo' concept, with record and replay between the major components
Lunch was good - more later
Posted by: Scott Hanselman | 2004.10.24 at 03:20 AM