David’s slide really made my day. If you don’t get the title, check out the comments for an explanation.

I really don’t think we’re ever going to need all this WS-* insanity. If you’re looking for a reliable, simple, scalable and proven standards-based infrastructure please go read Architecture of the World Wide Web for a great overview, the Atom Publishing Protocol for a fine example and the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 RFCs for the basic specs. Everything we need for web services is already here and it works just fine, thank you.

We though it might be nice to try the recently released iFolder Enterprise Server. After upgrading our office server to Ubuntu Dapper Drake, about 4 hours of compiling, some really cool C# enterprise stacktraces and a lot of configuring, I finally got it running.

As you can see, the admin interface looks great in Safari. ;-)

The Greenpeace International Application Development Team is currently learning Ruby on Rails by writing an application during a three-day retreat.

Yesterday we dropped by for a few hours together with Andy to help the developers get started. Because of networking issues we didn’t get as far as we’d hoped, but after a few hours everybody was at least up and running.

This morning we ran the developers through a 90-minute crash course explaining the basics of Rails. It still amazes me how PHP and Java developers suddenly get this somewhat amazed but very happy look on their face when they realize how much nicer using Rails is going to be compared to the stuff they’ve been doing before.

You can follow the efforts of the development team on their weblog.