Earth Huggers and Underground Sculpture

I need to take a side trip from integration software!

It's really hard to keep up with my favorite physicist-turned-artist. Actually he's always been an artist, and once a physicist, there's no turning back. Pat Monk http://www.patmonk.com/ told me about his Earth Huggers sculptures last night. These are 16G stainless steel, each 32 by 48 inches. You can see from the pictures that they are embedded in the ground and make inviting "ground pieces." Ground pieces? Well, if you talk about "wall pieces," why not talk about ground pieces, although no one I know ever does.

Pat went on to tell me about his newest phase, which he calls "Underground Sculpture." If you check the link above, you may see a picture of one called "Double Mushroom" under construction. He told me that he's nearly done now, and that he inverted it and will bury it a couple of feet, so just the mushrooms will be above ground. I'm a little worried that he will go off the deep end and create beautiful sculptures that will have to be unearthed in order to to see them. Sounds crazy, but I know this man.

A few years ago he had an "unsculpture" phase. He very creatively disposed of some of his older sculptures by deconstructing them in all sorts of ways. He hid one inside a big cast concrete fish. (I have the fish, but don't remember what's inside. I think there's a picture somewhere, though.) Another was a life-sized carved wood woman that he took horizontal cross-sections from and re-assembled as a table top, which he covered with glass. Actually that one was very nice.

One of my favorites of Pat's sculptures is a stainless steel piece about 18 inches long, shaped like an elongated teardrop. The pointy end is in the ground with a steel plate around it. He claims it's the switch that he throws to get the earth on track each vernal and autumnal equinox.

Pat's my father, so I believe everything he tells me.

It's really hard to keep up with my favorite physicist-turned-artist. Actually he's always been an artist, and once a physicist, there's no turning back. Pat Monk www.patmonk.com told me about his Earth Huggers sculptures last night. You can see from the pictures that these are embedded in the ground and make charming "ground pieces." If you talk about "wall pieces," why not talk about ground pieces, although no one I know ever does.

From what I can tell, the earth loves the hugs and, who knows? Maybe they will help keep the earth Green, or at least happy.

Pat went on to tell me about his newest phase, which he calls "Underground Sculpture." If you check the link above right now, he has a picture of one called "Double Mushroom" under construction. He told me that he's nearly done now, and that he inverted it and will bury it a couple of feet, so just the mushrooms will be above ground. I'm a little worried that he will go off the deep end and have beautiful sculptures that will have to be unearthed to see them. Sounds crazy, but I know this man.

A few years ago he had an "unsculpture" phase. He very creatively disposed of some of his older sculptures by deconstructing them in all sorts of ways. He hid one inside a big cast concrete fish. Another was a life-sized carved wood woman that he took horizontal cross-sections from and reassembled as a table top, which he covered with glass. Actually that one was very nice.

One of my favorites of Pat's sculptures is a stainless steel piece about 18 inches long, shaped like a teardrop. The pointy end is in the ground. He claims it's the a switch the he throws to get the earth on track each vernal and autumnal equinox.

Pat's my father, so I believe everything he tells me.

Web Services and APIs Just aren't Enough

We've had a number of questions lately about how AppComm technology is different or better than Web services or APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). That's probably because we have been working on packaging Enterprise Enabler® various ways for low end, not-so-demanding point solutions. For example, if you want to access Salesforce.com from a WSS application, you could use the Salesforce.com AppComm with or without another AppComm, and in a few minutes configure a bi-directional ADO.net driver. When you want to get data from Salesforce.com, you just read from and write to the ADO.net object.

The AppComm technology assures simplicity beyond any API or Web service connectivity by leveraging, behind the scenes, all the knowledge of the APIs as well as any necessary coding, scripting and deciphering. The data is simply provided for selection and mapping, eliminating the hard-coding and difficult maintenance necessary when programming to APIs and Web services directly.

Well, that's the whole point! The fundamental philosophy behind Agile Integration Software http://agileintegrationsoftware.blogspot.com/2010/05/characteristics-of-agile-integration.html design hinges on encapsulating absolutely the most intelligence possible behind the scenes so that the tough, complex, or tedious work is only done once. If I have to study the API for SAP's RFCs (Remote Function Calls) to build connectivity components, why not design the connectivity as an AppComm, which means that if I do it well once, no one will ever have to read the API specs again!!! (sorry, for the triple exclamation points - my mother would not have approved, with her proper and perfect usage of the English language, but in this case, I think they are well deserved). Not only do you never have to study the API, but you don't have to understand the prerequisites, assumptions, and in what order all the calls must be made.

Off the shelf, AppComms encapsulate all that knowledge and programming in a flexible and reusable manner, so you can get going quickly. It discovers all the schema information specifically for the particular instance at hand, and allows you to select the data of interest. You can then configure the mapping without programming, which you would need to do without an AppComm.

The truth is, contrary to coerced popular belief, the fact that there exist Web services for accessing an application's data does not mean they are easy to use. And since you are programming instead of configuring, if there's a change to your application's data schema, you have to go back into the code and make changes in order to access new fields, or make sure that your integration doesn't crash because expected data is missing. AppComms know when the schema changes, and alert you to reconfigure.

There are clearly time and cost savings when utilizing the AppComm technology compared to accessing the raw Web services. When you combine the AppComm with its Agile Integration platform, you have the synergy for coordinating data access from multiple applications simultaneously, aligning and transforming the information on the fly and passing it to the destinations without staging.