I have just registered for WWDC 2006. This will be my first Apple developers conference since the Apple II days. Although I am quite excited about Leopard, the new Mac OS X release due in early 2007, I cannot avoid thinking that the OS glory days are already well behind us. It really looks like that in the near future all applications will be accessed through the browser.

Developing today any kind of application that does not allow users to create some kind of content that will ultimately be published to or shared through the web seems to be a recipe for failure. Most of these applications are written today in languages other than Objective-C on server platforms that are definitively not Macs.

Even so I do not lose my faith in Apple and I am sure that Steve Jobs will deliver new technologies that will make us developers want to spend more time working with XCode. I will keep you posted!.

I was just promoted as Technical Sales Manager at IBM. In this new role I will manage a team of almost thirty engineers from all of IBM’s software brands (DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli and Rational). This is going to be a tough challenge but I am really happy to have received this opportunity. I have always been unhappy with the way managers interact with technical people. They seem to forget their roots quite quickly and I will do my best to avoid all the pitfalls that I have been complaining about during my career.

I have spent a long boring week with a customer in Northern Mexico reviewing defective Java code. Since there wasn’t much to do (at least things that my wife would approve) I have spent some time recording this new episode that deals with important questions such as what is an ESB and how does it work. I hope that the increasing number of people who download the podcast is an indication that the subjects have been interesting so far. The next episode will deal with AJAX and I plan to later return to the subject of SOA and how to successfully implement it. Please let me know what other Enterprise IT matters you would like to see covered.

This new episode is about the relationship that exists between XML and Web Services. In it I cover topics such as SOAP and WSDL. Next week I will continue talking about SOA. Please enjoy and give me your feedback.