i've taken a second look at something i blogged recently -- a Motley Fool poster's overview of how Mac OS X fit into the world of web services -- and i have some nagging questions.

while Apple Events and AppleScript now have übercool support for making SOAP and XML-RPC requests, it was something else the poster said that drew my attention:

In OS X, open 'System Preferences', go to the 'Sharing' panel, the 'Application' tab, and click the checkbox for 'Allow Remote Apple events'.

You've just made every application on your system that can be scripted with AppleScript (most of them) into network-aware, net-enabled, application services. The network transmission is done via the open standard SOAP, exactly the same communication protocol that .NET is supposed to use.

this is double-plus übercool, and yet i can find nothing to support this claim.

am i being dense? has Apple implemented some way for Apple Events to respond to SOAP or XML-RPC requests? even if AppleScript was a required intermediate step, has the version of Apache shipped with Mac OS X been modified to pass SOAP requests to AppleScript?

according to soapware.org, what Apple has delivered in Web Services for Mac OS X is a SOAP client and not a full SOAP implementation.

IBM's developerWorks site has an interesting section devoted to web services. in addition to the usual toolkits and whitepapers, they also provide articles, tips, and tutorials. as you might expect, it has a bias towards IBM technologies and Java, but in the world of web services, the knowledge is portable.

if words like "MQSeries", and "CICS" make you cringe, you might want to give it a pass.

Scripting.com points to this article on XML.com about interop and web services. the author provides some simple examples (in Perl, Java, and .NET) of how web services deployed in one environment can be invoked from another.

SOAP: 99 & 44/100% pure interop.

Wired.com has an article about the relative ease with which one can cluster Power Macs.

for you Power Mac owners with jobs that need to be parallelized, i suggest Pooch.

there's only one reason i ever reboot into Mac OS 9. with this early pre-release software, i might not have to anymore.

Apple's developer notes make for good reading. hot on the heels of the devnote for the new iMac comes this one for the recently rev'd Power Mac G4.

"Privacy Seal To Help Identify Spam" -- c|net. coming soon, "Napalm To Help Put Out Fire," and "Matches To Help Identify Gas Leaks."

guess which other bankrupt company audited by Arthur Andersen also locked its employees out of their 401k plans just before the stock became worthless?

is there a story about a high-ranking executive warning the company about its aggressive (possibly deceptive) accounting practices? ah, yes, there is.

remember that little "time-out" in the Napster case? the New York Times is reporting that the labels sought the pause to prevent Napster from investigating claims that the record companies were illegally abusing copyrights.