Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Tim Bray has an item on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion explains how the Chinese government used subtle and simple techniques to help the population conform following the massacre. Those same techniques, according to the book, were used by the Chinese on prisoners of war during the Korean War.

The book is a really good one. When I mentioned some aspects that lend themselves to agile development, someone on the XP mailing list responded the book is his favorite from the last ten years. High praise, but I can see why.

The information is of practical use every day in this market-driven and political society. With many less dramatic, but more commonplace, stories I can't imagine most people not recognizing situations from their own lives.

I think the book should be required reading for high school students. May as well go into life somewhat prepared for the onslaught.

LT-TV

The Latest from Brightcove...

It won't be far off before linear television becomes the butt of such historic humor. Wow, everyone had to watch a show at the same time? You mean you couldn't just search and play?...

Brightcove and TiVo are announcing a partnership in which storytellers of all sizes will be able to deliver their programming to people's TVs via TiVo. Neat, huh?

New Orleans: Man-Made Disaster Says Corps

Harry Shearer (part-time New Orleans resident) writes...

This weekend, on public radio's Left, Right and Center, the panelists are, as usual, discussing what they believe are the top news stories of the week...

What they didn't choose was the Corps of Engineers report taking responsibility for the drowning of a great American city...

...it was astonishing to listen to these four natter on about the Treasury Secretary, while culpability for the worst man-made engineering disaster in the nation's history was ignored. Trust me, even if Henry Paulson becomes America's worst-ever treasury secretary, he won't cost you and me nearly as much, he won't be responsible for nearly as much suffering, as the Corps' malfeasance in the Crescent City. If it's not a top story this week, when it led NBC Nightly News and got front-page treatment (finally!) in the NYT, when might it be?

And he wrote earlier in the week...

Brian Williams was speaking, and my intention was to ask him, either privately or publicly, why, given his clear and undeniable commitment to the Katrina story, the role of the Army Corps of Engineers and the fact that this was a man-made disaster in New Orleans had not figured more prominently in his broadcasts...

...in a splendid bit of serendipity, that happened to be the day the Army Corps -- here's timing for you -- issued its modified limited mea culpa (no malfeasance found: asked Bob Bea of UC Berkeley, if the work they did didn't do what it was supposed to do, and wasn't built in the way it was supposed to have been, how is that not malfeasance?). So our brief conversation came at the end of a broadcast whose lead story was the news that the flooding of New Orleans was a man-made, not a natural, disaster.

I still think Kelsey was right all along

This Kelsey.

I was asked via email about Squeak's compatibility with the Erlang approach to concurrency.

I’d thought a little about this for Smalltalk when I worked at Gemstone. I don’t know enough about the Squeak VM to talk about it. Like Erlang’s and Gambit Scheme’s VMs, it would require the ability to create many 1000’s of non-OS threads very quickly and run them all fairly. I think Cincom’s commercial Smalltalk VM might approach these numbers.

Other approaches might be to implement Squeak’s VM in Gambit Scheme or use the Squeak compiler’s front end to generate Gambit Scheme code, i.e. give Squeak a new back end. Maybe one way to do this is to replace Squeak’s C code generation with Scheme. If I recall, there is no C code in Squeak, but there is a Smalltalk subset used for the core of the VM implementation and that subset is translated fairly simply into C. If that could be retargeted into Gambit Scheme then you might be off to the races. The Process class, etc. would have some finagling to get them more directly mapped to Gambit’s thread procedures.

One thing about Erlang, and Termite processes (if you don’t cheat and go down to the Gambit level) is they are “shared nothing”, while Scheme threads and Smalltalk processes are “shared everything”. You may want to keep the current Smalltalk definition of Process the way it is, and come up with some new class, e.g. “SharedNothingProcess” that provides the new approach. Then you can run “legacy” code but try to enforce a better concurrency model.

Gambit has per-thread mailboxes and thread-local storage which can be used for this. Smalltalk globals would be considered “bad legacy” and you could try to give thread-local variables a decent syntax.

Implementing a new Smalltalk, moving Gnu Smalltalk, or moving Ruby to Gambit Scheme would be much easier than doing anything with Squeak. And guess what? Scheme *has* continuations. 8^P (I bow to the noble porters of Ruby to really bad VMs. "Continuations" shows up on each of their web pages --- on the "to-do" list.)

But Squeak has a lot of cool stuff. Croquet would figure in there somewhere when it comes to distributed VMs.

What did Kelsey get right?

Using concepts from denotational semantics, we have produced a very simple compiler that can be used to compile standard programming languages and produces object code as efficient as that of production compilers. The compiler is based entirely on source-to-source transformations performed on programs that have been translated into an intermediate language resembling the lambda calculus. The output of the compiler, while still in the intermediate language, can be trivially translated into machine code for the target machine.

In this case the "trivially translated into machine code" means Gambit is the intermediate language. Then gsc translates into C. Then gcc translates into machine code. Ah, that's why you also want something like gsi around for the source language.

That would be a fun and useful project to work on.

Tsung

Interesting tool using Erlang...

In a few words, Tsung is a distributed load testing tool. It is protocol-independent and can currently be used to stress Jabber/XMPP server, but also HTTP, SOAP, and postgreSQL servers. Developed as an extensible framework, this tools can be used to generate very large realistic benchmarks on a limited number of servers.

...Tsung is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

daily zen

The realm of buddhahood is not some external world
Where there is a formal “Buddha”

- Zen Master Ta-hui (1088-1163)

My Web...

...goes to eleven.

(or, I'll see your Web 2.0 and raise you nine Webs. 8^)

Trademarks cost money. Copyright is free, but I probably can't protect this brilliancy with a copyright. I have no lawyers, just this really big, shiny, intimidating copyright symbol. And even that was borrowed.

_{"My Web goes to eleven" Copyright © 2006 Patrick Logan. All Rights Reserved.}

Portland, Programming Language Capital?

OK, let's see. Here in Portland this year we have OSCON, OOPSLA, the Dynamic Languages Symposium, and now I see we have the SIGPLAN Conference on Functional Programming, and the SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop.

Good thing I'm not planning any long trips out of town this year. I could easily miss several good conferences in one fell swoop.

I have a great submission for the DLS but I have had no time to work on the project, let alone the paper. Next year the conference will probably be half-way around the world. All I can say at this point is it involves various degrees of Ruby, Erlang, and Scheme. Or it would involve them if I had actually made much progress on it.

Today is the deadline for the DLS submissions and all I could do was watch it woosh on past me. I am not sure it would make sense for the Erlang Workshop, but that deadline is June 9, so I can guarantee I won't have an "ACM ready" paper by then anyway. I'd be satisfied to have something to show and talk about at those events, given the opportunity for feedback from some really smart people.

I have started some modest tinkering with Atom. There is another Code Camp here in July. That was a lot of fun last year. I submitted a session for programming with Atom. But the good thing about this conference is it's just about showing some instructional code work, nothing fancy is necessary, and no paper to be written. They don't even like slides with text that isn't code.

For Better or Worse?

A fascinating discussion is taking place over at James Robertson's site on globalization, labor, and progress. Below is a duplication of my most recent comment I added there.

Could things be worse? Heck yes. I agree they have been worse. Can things change for the better? Yes. How? Good question. That requires unselfishness to generally take a higher priority than selfishness.

We are genetically predisposed to selfishness. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It got a lot of us to a pretty good place. What's not clear to me is how well selfishness will get us to the next level.

Have we run out of room for selfishness as the driver for "progress"? Have we run out of room for our current definition of "progress" itself?

Are we at a point where for anyone to survive in the long-term more people have to adapt to "unselfishness" as a driver? Why are so many of our mainstream religions apparently based on unselfishness, and yet we do not seem to be predisposed to unselfishness beyond a relatively small group of people, especially those closely related to our own DNA?

Why is it easy to be "globally" unselfish as a result of relatively minor events like the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and yet significantly more difficult to be unselfish as a result of ongoing major events such as the daily rate of deaths due to hunger, or even aids, or malaria?

There are a lot of fascinating questions about how we got here and how we get to the next step. One could argue we are on a good path. On the other hand one could argue we are not, by and large. It's hard to tell.

Roots

From No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology...

We’re not going back to what we tried once; we’re going back to what others had success with. The industry at large tried to go a different way, and at long last we’ve begun to realize that no matter how many new tools we throw at our problems, software development still isn’t getting any easier. Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole way we’ve been going. The people who really embraced Lisp and Smalltalk early on don’t think those languages failed (except in terms of gaining broad acceptance). On the contrary, most of them that I know are either still finding ways to work with those technologies or else yearning for a return to the good old days.

The industry has been on these merging paths for decades without clearly realizing it. Now it is starting to shed its static appearances as it reaches the tipping point. Soon after reaching that point we will behave as if this is the path we'd bet on long ago.

Premature Extrapolation

'We should listen to Donald Knuth when he said, "We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil." This is the most important thing that you'll ever hear as a software developer.'

-Cal Henderson, Building Scalable Web Sites

If it breaks, make it heavier. If it doesn't, make it lighter.

-Paul McCready, Gossamer Condor

A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse's chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet...

Like the other weapons of influence, this one lies deep within us... It is quite simply, our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.

-Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Read-Write Web -- Web 0.1?

I vote for Tim Bray's preference for "read-write web". As I understand it that was the original intention of the web, so let's go back to it

Web 0.1?

Feeling Strest?

A blogless(!) friend points me to this item on lowering your strest level...

The vast majority of supposedly 'REST' Web APIs are simply abusing HTTP to carry function calls. I call these APIs 'Service-Trampled REST', or STREST.

Griddle Cakes

OK, I could not come up with a bad title. The best I could do was a really bad title, so to make up for that, here's a recipe for cornmeal griddle cakes. Enjoy.

On to the business at hand...

I'm fairly sure XMPP is to Grid and JINI as HTTP was to WS and CORBA. Give it a few years - instant messaging is where real commodity grid action will take place.

Neat.

Prematurity

Mike Herrick panics from fuzzy about WS-*...

The truth is there is massive premature standardization occurring.

He's got a lot of good posts, subscribe, read them all.

Big Time

Tim Bray on JavaOne and big, formal conferences generally...

If you’ve been to a camp-style event or unconference, some aspects of the whole sit-and-listen-to-the-guy-on-the-stage thing start to grate.

The best "conference" I attended last year was a Code Camp.

Continuations

Tim Bray has an entry that is a continuation from Gilad Bracha, and others have continued from there. Dynamic languages, continuations, and the JVM... the thing about continuations is they are not immediately obvious because they are not available in most languages.

Those that have them have found they are not useful for the everyday programmer's applications. But they do provide a fundamental building block that simplify the several of the building blocks that *do* end up in the everyday programmer's applications.

By the way, continuations *are* implemented in the Rhino Javascript system and the SISC Scheme system for the JVM. I believe they are also in the JVM and dotnet backends for the Bigloo Scheme system. They would be more efficient in the JVM per se, but I'm just saying...

You're not going to see an overwhelming number of programmers saying, "we want continuations!" That will not be an effective gauge for determining their value at the VM level.

The Future of (Presentation|All) Software

Jon Udell writes...

...it's democratic, not elitist, to believe that presentations ought to be first-class citizens of the web, viewable by any standards-based browser with full interactive fidelity. If we've failed to fully democratize the necessary authoring software -- as, so far, we have -- then shame on us. There's no longer any good reason why we couldn't make it easy for people to create effective presentations through the web as well as for the web, and there are plenty of good reasons why we could and should.

A Thousand Points of Light

Steve Dekorte recalls...

Let's see, so far Bush has:

• started preemptive wars by lying to the public
• killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process
• created secret prisons that employ torture
• exposed CIA operatives for political reasons
• instituted a massive illegal surveliance on millions of Americans

Did I miss anything?

Yeah, well, there's that little incident down in New Orleans. There are the Halliburton-built detention centers. There were the threats made to politicians if they did not vote for the prescription drug plan give-away to the pharmaceutical industry. There's... it's a long list but a short weekend.

Oh, yeah. There was that attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And...

Um. Thinking. There was that one guy... Osama something, that Bush let get away when he was thought to be cornered in Afghanistan. Of course at one point Bush said... "I don't really think about him very much. I'm not that concerned." But then in the 2004 presidential debate he said... "Of course we're worried about Osama bin Laden. We're on the hunt after Osama bin Laden. We're using every asset at our disposal to get Osama bin Laden."

Then there's that fake news reporter in the White House, Jeff Gannon, who also turned out to be a gay porn star with several unexplained visits. But there's the whole anti-gay marriage drama to get Bush re-elected.

And speaking of fake news, there are those news footages which turned out to be supplied by the White House to the media to run as real news. Although Bush acknowledged having them made, he would not agree to discontinue the practice.

And, sigh. Remember we are just stupid, gullible monkeys. And he's the leader of the monkey world. What more can you expect?

Erlang, Now With SMP

The latest Erlang is out, and now supports SMP with much less effort than before.

SMP is supported by most modern operating systems like Linux, Windows, Mac OSx, Solaris and is becoming more important now when dual processors, hyper-threading technology and multi-core systems are a reality.

With Erlang, most of the problems which occur in multi-threaded programs have been solved once and for all in the Erlang VM and do not have to be handled by the application programmers.

In the SMP version of the Erlang virtual machine, there can be many process schedulers running in separate OS threads. As default there will be as many schedulers as there are processors or processor cores on the system.

The SMP support is totally transparent for the Erlang programs. That is, there is no need to change or recompile existing programs. Programs with built-in assumptions about sequential execution must be rewritten in order to take advantage of the SMP support, however.

In this release, the Erlang VM supports SMP with focus on stability. There will follow a number of subsequent steps with necessary optimizations and support for more platforms.

The Da Vinci Code Movie

I saw The Da Vinci Code last night on a big, big screen. Ebert gave it 3 of 4 stars. I would give it 3.5 or 4 of 4.

I've read some review such as Shawn Levy's review in The Oregonian gave it a B- and he complained the movie did not move quickly enough. I also read that some actors just "mailed in" their performances, but at least not to the extent that I noticed.

I thought the movie moved well. Details were cut from the book, obviously. Some dialog and scenes changed a good bit, especially at the end I think. I read the book over a year ago.

The book really should not have made a good movie, I thought at least when I heard it would be done. The book is too much talking about the past and puzzle solving. As it turned out the director, scenarists, and effects people handled that well, much better than I thought it would be presented.

I think the movie has more humor than the book, and it works. I think the movie is a bit more conciliatory than the book to traditional Christians and even the Opus Dei nut jobs. Evangelicals generally will not be happy of course. Anyway they're busy drinking really bad punch out of really small glasses and eating really bad cookies, at their church listening to an "expert" arm them with the facts they need to convince their friends that this movie is just fiction.

Well, it's good fiction, better than most stories in "The Bible". I am going to see it again this weekend if possible. The sun is shining more than expected though.

Heresy

How ironic that some believers in a virgin birth and a resurrection from a death (which by the way show up in many stories about various gods) want to ban others from seeing a movie whose plot includes a "heresy" in that it proposes the possibility that two people (who themselves may be fictional for all we know) may have been married two thousand years ago.

Ah. Yeah. Run that by me again?

Marissa Laguardia, chairwoman of the Philippine government's movie-review panel, told the AP... "So are we just out of the Stone Age?"

No, sometimes it seems we are still *in* the Stone Age.

Virtual Machines for Small Form Factors?

Tim O'Reilly writes about the value of small form factor devices connected to Internet data...

It's a sign that special purpose hardware providing access to internet data services may eventually be commonplace.

On the other hand I don't want to carry around five or ten devices. I'd rather have a three form factors and carry around one of them, the one that is most useful for the moment. That may be a wrist watch sized device, a larger cell phone sized device, or a small laptop sized device.

I'd like virtual machines running on each of these with images of the systems I want to use. Most of my systems would run on any of the form factors and use as much of the capabilities of each as possible. Everything would be synched, backed up, and enhanced through the Internet to my big system that stays put at home and/or at some other site.

People with ideas for new capabilities would not design new hardware, just new virtual images for the common hardware. Every year or so I would upgrade one or more of the devices to the newest physical devices available. All the old images would continue to run.

Expressionism

Update: Don sets me straight, and rightfully so with a good exposition. I did not do my homework.

End Update

Don Box writes about compiling code on the fly in C# 3.0, kind of, I think...

Expression<Func<int, int>> expr = a => a + 3;
Console.WriteLine(expr); // prints "a => Add(a, 3)"
Func<int, int> func = expr.Compile(); // LCG's an MSIL method from the expr
Console.WriteLine(func(4)); // prints "7"

He equates (incorrectly from what I can tell) the above C# 3.0 with the following Scheme from 25 years ago...

(define expr '(lambda (a) (+ a 3)))
(display expr)
(define func (eval expr (scheme-report-environment 5)))
(display (func 4))

I think the comparison has some flaws. Maybe I just don't know enough about C# 3.0 (until just now I knew nothing about it).

First of all the expression (quote (lambda (a) (+ a 3))) is *data*, in particular a list of atoms and nested lists of atoms. That list is bound to a variable called expr, whose name is conveying that the data *may* be evaluated as a lambda expression. But it is not a lambda expression, it is a list. The C# code appears to require something to be declared as an Expression. Is such a class something that can be built programmatically? Or does it have to be declared and constructed intact?

Plus if it is already an expression, why would it need to be compiled? In the Scheme example, the list has to be evaluated to get a lambda, i.e. the function that the original list of atoms resembles. If you start with an expression, you should not have to do an eval or compile to get an evaluatable thing. That's just wrong. You'd just do this...

(define func (lambda (a) (+ a 3)))  ; No QUOTE form. It's already a function.
(display (func 4))                  ; Just apply it.

Or even more simply...

(display ((lambda (a) (+ a 3)) 4))  ; No QUOTE form. Just apply it.

One more thing: where is the QUOTE form in the C# code? The quote mark in Scheme is short hand for wrapping a special form (QUOTE ...) around something that you consider "data". i.e. QUOTE prevents evaluation. Does the Expression class automatically get recognized by the C# evaluator to prevent the RHS from being evaluated? Come on, either the RHS is data or the RHS is an expression. Or can the compiler only work with a special kind of data that happens to be called an Expression. Weird any way you slice it from what I can make of it.

I don't get it, and maybe there is a more complete and logical explanation. Maybe the answer is "Pat, you're confused because you already know a simpler language like Scheme." Yeah, so why not use C++?

As it stands it looks like there is a bit of confusion and complication that separates C# 3.0 from simpler, more agile languages like Scheme, Python, and Ruby.

Just use those languages, folks. Don't get strung out on these incremental "improvements" to a language that was too complex to begin with.

Congratulations

Hello to Laoise de hÓra. Congratulations to the family.

Tell All The People - Follow Me Down

A musical tribute to Stephen Colbert...

There's no denying the huge supporting role Jon Stewart played in this victory. Both Stewart and Colbert had to use their people-skills over a long period of time to gain access to their marks. Jon Stewart loaded the bases and Colbert hit it over the fence. It reminds me a bit of the tactics of the "Yes Men".

What's On Your Hard Disk

Found on ACM Queue's "What's on your hard disk" results...

Who: S... R.......
What industry: Technology vendor (software, hardware, etc.)
Job title: Programmer/Analyst
Flavor: Develops on Windows for all platforms (JVM)
Tool I love!
Squeak. I am forced to use Java at work to build enterprise applications, but at home I play with and enjoy Squeak. After eight hours of working in a traditional IDE, coming home to Squeak is pure joy. Its system browser and method finder are excellent programmer resources.
Tool I hate!
Eclipse. This IDE suffers from a misleading and often incorrect debugger. Furthermore, it can’t refactor multiple files correctly and has a buggy interface. But it is free and nicely configurable. I love it and hate it.

Links

Follow this link because Bill de hÓra has some good links to follow.

Not Yet In A Groove

Kris Tuttle of Research 2.0 on Microsoft's future...

Ray Ozzie seems to be the face of future innovation at Microsoft these days. So far we are pretty unimpressed. We have used Lotus Notes and Groove. Both definitely had visionary elements in their functionality but operationally left a good bit to be desired. In fact Groove reminded us of Outlook in terms of the vast resources it consumed relative the functions delivered. (We don't use any bloated products anymore in this shop...) Ray has been a trooper and introduced concepts like the Live Clipboard that some like, we think it treats the symptom and not the disease.

Maybe give him some time. I was kind of shocked years ago when I read about the technology developed for Groove.

Kris in a subsequent post writes about expanding her use of Google ads to incude Microsoft's ad machine...

So wanting to be fair I went to MSN AdCenter today to set it up in a similar fashion to how our company uses Google AdWords. Unfortunately I didn't get to square one because they don't support FireFox.

I wonder if Groove had leveraged open source components in a platform-independent way if it would have been a bigger success and still evolving. Microsoft has a great big wall around their universe, nevertheless it is still a wall and they continue to imprison themselves.

Agile Languages and SAP

Piers Harding announces...

I'm proud to announce the latest updates of the SAP RFC integration packages for Perl, Python and Ruby.

Dup or Ref?

Bill de hÓra writes...

Both JRuby and Jython have experienced stop start development.

And then goes into several interesting directions. (BTW, the original Erlang book is good, but not essential for adopting Erlang. Instead start with Erlang in Real Time which is online and more in-depth. Everything else you need is on the erlang site, including the mail lists.)

Anyway my thought is that running multiple languages on the JVM or CLR is beneficial simply because there are no *really* good inter-language communication mechanisms. Being in the same OS process is useful but certainly there are times when that is undesirable for security and reliability reasons.

Given the oncoming multi-core low end systems, the oncoming many-core high end systems, and the realization that "SOA" in its best possible interpretation is just "reality" for tomorrow's programmers (cf. "Notes on Postmodern Programming") we need to get over this "use my OS/VM/language" / "no, use *my* OS/VM/language" parade asap.

Erlang may never be popular regardless of the books available or not. (Then again with ejabberd, Erlang *may*... er, forget it. Jabber will more likely be the inter-language communication mechanism I claim we're missing.) But just as Lisp got data right, and Smalltalk got objects right, Erlang got processes right.

Sooner or later your language and runtime will too. And the sooner the better because I cannot count on anyone porting my language to your runtime, and I sure don't have any incentive to do so myself.

Meanwhile rather than try to program all of the latest Ruby or Python in the JVM or in the CLR, I am wondering whether we need to expose Java and C# libraries via their own processes connected to a simple communication mechanism with a simple, reflection-based interpreter on the receiving end.

Hey, JVM, just sit there and do what I tell you. I don't need that to be more than the current implementation of Jython or (the upcoming 1.0 release of) IronPython. Or take your pick, maybe Javascript is the lingua franca via Rhino and... er, dotnet does have a Javascript interpreter, right?

If I ship my application to you as a, say, a VMWare player and image running the OS of my choice, pared down to what my application needs, plus a few OS processes running on that image, each implemented in the language of choice for that process, plus some inter-communication between them, and all of them going out to the real world as desired, then... would I be happy with that kind of Gordian Knot post-modernism?

Just a Little is Enough

Steve Loughran writes...

As an aside, ...it's clear that Tomcat is all that most server-side [Java] installations need.

More Colbert Gushing

Steven Hart writes that Colbert's performance is like Swift delivering A Modest Proposal in the king's court. Of course this is still America and critics are deflecting a lot of heat by writing about how great America is that Colbert has the right to do such a thing. But Hart responds to those statements correctly...

Colbert is as much a target for big media now as Howard Dean was in 2004 once he announced on NBC's Meet the Press that he'd be in favor of disallowing General Electric from owning NBC. He will have more than a little trouble getting the White House Correspondents' forum back again for similar comments. Making this into a triumph for "free speech" is missing the point by as wide a margin as the adminstration missed so many calculations about the Iraq invasion.

It's one thing to march into the lion's den and yank a fistful of hairs from his mane. It's quite another to march into a den full of people who think they're lions and rub their noses in the fact that they're nothing more than fat, spayed tabby cats who are less interested in exposing the powerful than they are in curling up by their feet.

That's what Stephen Colbert did at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and for his perfidy he will now be subject to their endless mewling and kitty-kat clawing. Even if he loses his nerve and backtracks with an apology — something I don't think for a second he would actually do — he will always be their target. After all, the eunuchs of the court were often the most devious and vengeful of the players surrounding the king...

Colbert's performance was a display of wit at its most lethally cutting. He went into a room with the most powerful man in the world and his courtiers, and he excluded them from the land of the free and the home of the brave.

If the White House courtiers had an ounce of self-respect, they'd all book a flight to Alaska, find a good-sized ice floe and shove themselves out into the ocean. Instead, they'll just go about their routines. They may walk funny for a little while, after the way they've been used, but after six years of covering the Bush administration, they're probably accustomed to that kind of thing.

Daily Zen

Daily Zen...

"You’re traveling beyond hope of return"

- Hsieh Ling-yun (385-433 C.E.)

I Have A Brief Statement...

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are two of the three television programs that I know of where real news is reported. Democracy Now is the third, and ranks above the comedy shows. TDS and TCR though are simultaneously the two comedies worth watching. (If Amy Goodman could even just learn to crack a smile once and again...)

Colbert has balls, so view the videos and thank him for what he did to Washington and the press. Some people are arguing that it was uneven or did not have a comedy crescendo. I thought it was hilarious in places but to be appreciated overall just as a supreme "fuck you" to the establishment in Washington.

Even by TDS and TCR standards, he blew past them in an opportunity that he may never have received again to spell it out plainly right to the president's and the press' faces... the establishment is circling the drain in credibility, so stop with the games.

"It’s not just that Colbert’s jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld, or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more ‘truthiness’ than truth."

-Michael Scherer, Salon Magazine

From Colbert's "audition tape" for the White House Press Secretary's job...

"I have a brief statement. The press is destroying America."

Losing the War (No, not *that* war)

If Microsoft looks at Ruby as competion then Microsoft has already lost the war, let alone the battle. Whatever happened to that IronPython thingy? I thought that was supposed to make any agile language first-classable on the CLR.

Jabber

"Like email, but really fast"

-Peter Saint-Andre (Jingle.pdf)

Heresy

I enjoyed so much reading the abstract from Avi Bryant's upcoming OSCON 2006 talk about Seaside, I decided to replicate the whole thing here...

Over the last few years, some best practices have come to be widely accepted in the web development world. Share as little state as possible. Use clean, carefully chosen, and meaningful URLs. Use templates to separate your model from your presentation.

Seaside is a web application framework for Smalltalk that breaks all of these rules and then some. Think of it as an experiment in tradeoffs: if you reject the conventional wisdoms of web development, what benefits can you get in return? Quite a lot, it turns out, and this "experiment" has gained a large open source following, seen years of production use, and been heralded by some as the future of web applications.

In this talk, you'll learn in-depth about Seaside's heretical design choices, and how it benefits from them. In particular, you'll see how closures and shared state let you ignore the details of URLs and query fields; how the right HTML generation API makes you less tied to your presentation layer, not more; how continuations free you from ever thinking about workflow as a state machine again; and how all of this combines to enable modularity and reuse like you've never seen before.

No prior Smalltalk experience necessary; open mind recommended.

Waiting for WS-Success

Dan Creswell writes about the search for real, rich SOAP-based systems...

Real-world examples are what I measure on, rightly or wrongly.

Maybe they could be captured on the WS-Success wiki when they are found.

WS-Misunderstood

Eric Newcomer writes in the SOA yahoo group...

Web services specifications are misunderstood and not implemented correctly. JAX-RPC is the kind of "poster child" for this.

Steve Burbeck and Multicellular Computing

Jon Udell has an interesting session with Steve Burbeck (who's only apparent career blemish appears to be the design of UDDI 8^).

[Update: Steve explains his role with UDDI in a comment on this post.]

Burbeck's history goes back to that Tektronix Smalltalk community here in Portland that spawned Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Gemstone Smalltalk, Digitalk Smalltalk, etc. The work Cunningham, Burbeck, and others did at Wyatt with a Smalltalk-based trading system is a gold mine of ideas barely tapped, yet more relevant than most enterprisey systems built since.

Someone could write a book on Tek Labs and the direct and indirect influence it had not just in popularizing Smalltalk, but design patterns, agile programming, etc. It's reach is far and wide and largely unrecognized.

Back to Burbeck... the current references are to his work on multi-cellular computing. Apoptosis is an increasingly recorgnized pattern, e.g. from the Erlang community the idea that small components should give up quickly and allow a higher-order component handle the fault.

Stigmergy is interesting... it's not really found in Erlang, except I guess it is in a sense what the Mnesia distributed database is for. It's also a key aspect of the Linda tuple spaces / Javaspaces model, and the idea of "blackboards" in artificial intelligence.

Linux Fest Northwest incl. Tim Bray

Linux Fest Northwest is on April 29 in Bellingham, WA. That's a beautiful part of the state in the north Cascades not too far from Vancouver, BC. Admission is free.

I hope I can make it up there. Tim Bray is scheduled to talk on things non-enterprisey...

"XML, Open Source, Complexity, Simplicity"

There are a number of other interesting presentations scheduled.

WWW2007 in the Canadian Rockies

Mark Baker is helping with WWW2007, which will be held in Banff. I will what I can to be there. The Canadian Rockies is in the Top 5 of my favorite locations in North America and I could use any excuse to go back there.

Oh, I'm sure the conference will be interesting too.

When *Everything* Is An Object

James Robertson explains how "the control stack" is just an object in Smalltalk, and what you can do with that. This is what enables systems like Seaside to be so simple for the application developer. Seaside grabs stacks, saves them, applies them again later, etc.

Due Recognition

Jon Udell gets some due recognition. Jon is an observant and curious (in a good way!) person, qualities I admire.

I recently met Jon and several other Infoworld people at their SOA Forum in San Francisco. They were all a fun group of folks, and I was fortunate to have some time to talk with them about all kinds of things beyond the industry.

WS .LT. CORBA

Andrew Townley provides very good evidence that WS-* is significantly *worse* than CORBA. He explains that CORBA (eventually) realized they need to specify the end-to-end world from language-specific API to interface description to protocol...

CORBA is... relevant here because it took the position of defining its own, end-to-end world: an interoperability-focused transport protocol in IIOP, interoperable operation interface specification in IDL and interoperable programming API specifications in the various language bindings. In all, it covered a lot of ground and was quite ambitious. However, I think the people behind CORBA knew that they wouldn’t really have portable distributed objects without specifying all of these things...

Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as was hoped.

The majority of Andrew's post exposes a huge gap in the WS-* approach by comparing WS-* based reliable messaging to the Java Message Service API for reliable messaging, as well as to CORBA as quoted above. Specifically, the differences boild down this way:

• JMS provides an API for Java only, but not a wire protocol. (Interoperability across JMS implementations typically done by bridging API calls from one implementation to another.)
• CORBA provides an API for various languages and a protocol.
• WS-* provides a protocol but not an API. Each vendor is free to give their customers whatever proprietary API they desire, locking you into their API along the way. Isolating these dependencies is up to you, but this is not a problem the vendors are overly concerned with, and certainly not something they need you to be aware of.

Andrew provides code examples in Java using different vendor APIs to implement the same protocol.

The... 3 examples are supposed to all accomplish the same thing: reliable delivery of a message from point A to B, or in WSA-speak: between a requester agent and a provider agent. However, if you were the one implementing the service, or in our case, a simple Messaging Bridge between JMS and something else (maybe another JMS implementation), your code is intrinsically tied to the vendor implementation. Change vendors, change your code. You’ve just inverted the JMS interoperability problem and have interoperability without compatibility rather than compatible interoperability.

OOPSLA 2006 in Portland

I have not attended an OOPSLA in five years. But this year the conference returns to its original 1986 location: Portland, Oregon. This will be the third OOPSLA in Portland.

OSCON and OOPSLA both in Portland this year.

The day before OOPSLA will be the Dynamic Languages Symposium. (via Steve Dekorte)

It's Enterprisey!

Overnight this new term and meme has taken hold. Would that I were not familiar precisely with that that it implies.

It's enterprisey!

Update:

Bill de hÓra writes in lesscode that the term now has among other things, a wikipedia entry, and a wonderfully animated architectural illustration with its own theme music.

Da-da-da-da-dadadadada! It's enterprisey!

Paul James on REST/HTTP

I don't think I've seen these before. Paul James has a number of useful REST articles on his site.

I believe heavily in developing web applications using the KISS principles of "less is more".

One Method Too Few or Too Many?

Ethan Fremen writes in a lesscode comment...

The main way in which the additional verbs are really helpful in an application is whenever you want to manipulate multiple resources at once. Of course, in most cases where you’re doing that, you’re using even more of those ‘useless’ verbs, like MKCOL and PROPFIND etc.

To me it’s like you’re arguing that the only methods anyone ever needs on a class are gettr and settr methods.

I don't think the comparison with an object-oriented programming language is helpful. Classes with only getters and setters are brittle in their context (very small amount of state that changes often, very closely located to collaborating objects within a single OS process, one or a few developers working together modify most of those classes, short release cycles).

On the other hand with a distributed system it may be that the more methods in a system the more brittle in that context (very large amount of state that does not change often, very remotely collaborating systems across multiple network boundaries, many developers who know little if anything of each other, long release cycles)

A mechanism to "manipulate multiple resources at once" in the latter, distributed HTTP context may be to construct a resource that represents the collection of resources and then manipulate *that* resource using the smaller number of verbs.

The hurdle I've mostly climbed over to the level I currently understand REST, HTTP, URIs, Atom, etc. is that this is not an object system. This is an application protocol (and architecture, formats, etc.) for distant collaboration. The challenge is to understand what are the conceptual pieces in this system and how to map ones needs into this system.

Most of the heavy computational lifting of those resources *does* take place in object systems (or functional or...) where there is a rich processing vocabulary. The distributed part is just about moving representations around in a coordinated fashion to enable the heavy compuational lifting at the appropriate time and place. The architecture for one is most likely not going to serve the characteristics of the other. The more they are considered distinct the better.

That said, I cannot clearly articulate when to create a new method except that the resistence to adopting that new method will be great so the time spent thinking about how to use the existing methods will more likely be the time well spent.

My second articulation would be to suggest that if you want to create a new method or two, then probably so do I and so do several others reading this. Before long we would be drowing in a sea of new methods. There may be a Cambrian Explosion of new collaborative techniques if we focus on how better to combine the pieces we already have. Inventing another nucleotide should be a very high bar.

Update:

In another lesscode comment Paul James confirms this approach...

You don’t need new verbs to manipulate multiple resources at once, you just need another resource that represents all the resources you want to manipulate together and to then manipulate that with your existing verbs.

TSSTTCPW

Good news for Java programmers seeking the simplest SOAP stack that could possibly work...

I am back implementing Alpine. This has no dynamic redeploy, no ease of use features, no Java1.4 support, no annotations. It's going to be so simple I will have it working before I fly off to the Alps for my ski trip

The Coming Breakage: Minimize Dependencies

Steve Loughran writes about old binaries running (or not) on the next version of the Windows OS...

Now, making old apps work bad may finally create incentive for people to upgrade their office suite, but it will also break every single IT-written win32 app out there. That's serious, and going to become and ongoing issue, I suspect.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. Don't write Win32 binaries. Code in Java, Python, Ruby, Squeak or other interpreted language, and trust the runtime to be signed by the time vista ships. You sneak past the security problem without having to go to any effort, and you avoid being at all dependent upon the OS and any more delays.

If you want to take advantage of some specific OS, framework, library, or whatever... why would you not code the independent 80% part, well, independently? Writing software to your advantage is always about minimizing unnecessary dependencies.

$100

Don Box has a couple of interesting posts on Microsoft's support for REST/HTTP. I don't know a whole lot about the products, but there's a long list.

He asks a good question: how would you dole out $100 in support of REST/HTTP within Microsoft. Since I cannot really address specifics within their current product line, I'd consider something like this:

• $25 toward furthering their current investments in open REST technology, e.g. Atom and APP support in various systems and frameworks.
• $25 toward open RESTful "push" technology, e.g. XMPP and mod_pubsub.
• $25 toward a RESTful coordination technology above HTTP per se. Something like Rogue Wave's defunct Ruple XML tuple space, but using REST/HTTP. Deliver this as a live service (i.e. like Amazon's S3 but with somewhat richer associative memory than just keys or URLs (a URL is just a key, right?)) as well as a framework that others can deliver on their own systems and customize.
• $25 for better treatment of dynamic languages at Microsoft. I believe REST/HTTP/XMPP/etc. are to distributed systems generally as dynamic languages are to programming languages generally. To be fully RESTful I think you have to be as simple as possible and fully dynamic. Doing this will stimulate more RESTful ideas within Microsoft. I know they have a number of Ruby programmers... turn that amp to eleven.

LAMP on a Grid

Mark Baker writes...

Finally, the Web's getting its due.

Ok, so who wants to break the news to the Grid folk? 8-)

The most interesting vendor at the Infoworld Executive SOA Forum last week was ActiveGrid, a LAMP-based grid for various purposes.

The Same Old Place

Or was that the old Same place? Nevertheless...

I'd sure like to understand this claim and prediction from Eric Newcomer of Iona...

Now with customers deciding on the approach independently of technology, the roles are reversing. Customers are starting to tell vendors what kind of technology they need by creating their SOA based designs independently of their technology decisions.

This strikes me as a very good trend, and appropriate for where we are in the evolution of the software industry, helping to lead us to a place of resolution for the current frustrations with enterprise software.

I see a lot of people putting blind faith in WS-* because the industry has told them to. But then the industry says WS-* interop is not ready and there is no standard for a full service bus, so you have to make an investment in a specific vendor.

Same old story from what I can see. Anyone that wants an agile enterprise can get it using technology that is ten years old or more. There is *no* need to invest in WS-* or an ESB. I think an ESB could be a good investment in some cases but not because of any promise of a "standards-based platform".

Software Development *Is* Program Transformation

Let's celebrate another post from Ralph Johnson...

I do not say that program development *should* be program transformation, I claim that it already is. Most work on software is after the first released version. The purpose of work on existing software is to transform it to the new version. Since almost all work on software is converting version N to version N+1, almost all work on software is program transformation...

I do not claim that program transformations are easy, or that they can be automated, or even that we can always understand them. I am claiming that thinking of software development as program transformation is likely to lead to improvements in how we develop software.

BS-Transfer?

Mark Baker writes...

I'm calling bullshit on WS-Transfer. Please join me.

Favorite SOA Observation

My favorite observation from Infoworld's Executive SOA Forum last Thursday came from The VP of Enterprise Architecture at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Pointing out that SOA is nothing new, he had first encountered the idea in Tandem's shared nothing messaging capability. (pdf)

The same observation was made by Alan Kay in the 1960's about the Burroughs B5000 and contributed to his invention of Smalltalk. And then there's Erlang and other shared nothing systems.

You wanna make fourteen dollars the hard way? (WAV)

-Rodney Dangerfield, Caddyshack

But Will It Be Compelling?

James Robertson makes an observation that will please my 13 year old (a dyed in the wool Nintendo fanatic)...

Sony's release dates for the PS3 are starting to look like the planning for Longhorn

What is Success?

Tim Bray writes about WS-* vs. ReST/HTTP...

Speaking for myself, not for Sun, I think that we ought to be pouring resources and investment into tooling and developer support around simple XML/HTTP/REST technologies. You know, the standardized ones that work today.

Vendors have sunk a lot of time and money into SOAP and WSDL. Appearances are this effort has gone into easing the burden of programming with SOAP and WSDL. That should tell us something about their languages as well as something about SOAP and WSDL.

What's the result?

Adam Tratchenberg spoke about ebay's approach to versioning their numerous web services at Infoworld's SOA Executive Forum last Thursday. When asked how ebay performs compatibility tests across multiple languages and toolkits, his response was they test with Java, .Net, and PHP. My guess is they don't test with many of the Java toolkits. Perhaps they test with .Net's various toolkits because Windows many programmers are in various stages of adoption.

Anyone with an incompatible toolkit or language though is not left out in the cold... ebay provides an HTTP and POX interface for each method. Can ebay's approach be considered a success for SOAP and WSDL given this lack of universality?

What if the vendors sunk as much money into making HTTP and POX as convenient as they're trying to do with SOAP and WSDL?

Meanwhile at least the long march toward more compatibility in WS-* continues. I've not found a list of attendees to Microsoft's interop session. My sense is the list of languages and toolkits is fairly short (Indigo and Sun's Java toolkit. Others?)

Is this a barrier to entry that guarantees its ultimate demise?

Keep It Simple

mdavidx5 asks a great question in response to my post about Amazon's S3...

Why the fuck do people have to insist on complicating things?

Maybe it is the case that S3 is the simplest thing that could work. But I think there is something between S3 and the full-blown web hosting provider he's fearing.

The simple way S3 works is as an associative memory between keys and values. As long as you know which key to use, this is a great service. But what if you need to retrieve your data based on some contents?

The key / value pair approach of S3 is the degenerate case of associative memory. I don't think S3 has to be about anything more than storage, but there I think there will be some room for associative retrieval of some complexity beyond simple keys.

If the pipe was big enough then there would be no trouble bringing gigabytes over the pipe and doing the associative lookup remotely. Or one could store in S3 the data itself under one key and various indexes under another set of keys. That's clunky but I can imagine someone trying it.

mdavidx5's point is well taken though. Keep it simple.

Storage Paradigms

Stephen Williams writes in the FoRK email list on an exchange about Amazon's new storage service...

I firmly believe that both full filesystem semantics and ACID integrity constraints are red herrings and have seen a number projects reach the same conclusion...

With database-based applications, even when you have ACID capabilities, there are a number of reasons to avoid updates, avoid "accumulators", and otherwise avoid many of the situations where you needed transactions to begin with.

Having worked on and with very complicated object-oriented databases, very complicated relational databases, and other approached, I've noodled for some time on the possibilty that there are three basic persistence patterns that can meet a ton of needs.

I will be interested to learn if Amazon has now or will offer some higher-level services on their storage service. Search, matching, versioning, etc. I see they want to keep it simple, and I agree with that. Before long though people will want to do things with their storage. Some of those things will be better done very close to the data itself.

I wonder if/when we'll see the ability to put computations very near Amazon's storage (including indexes, calculations, searches, etc.) that are aware of the format of the stored data, that is secure, etc. Storage is just the most basic start of a shared grid of services.

First Class Nonsense

A problem with our industry (is it more than ours?) is the loose use of terms that truly have a formal definition. What is the meaning of this claim?

In contrast to standard distribution middleware such as CORBA or Java RMI, an SOA implements processes as first-class entities.

This is on page 58 of the March/April IEEE Software magazine (pdf). I wonder if the editors have any more sense of how wrong this is than the authors?

First of all, SOA has no formal definition. Secondly, in any common use of the term SOA, there is nothing resembling a process, let alone a first-class process.

Smalltalk has something close to first-class processes. Kali Scheme, yes, even distributed first-class processes. Termite Scheme, uh-huh.

SOA is so far from having anything resembling first-class processes that such a claim in an institutional publication is incredibly disheartening. In 2006 our programming languages *should* have first-class processes.

A Little Rest Here and There

Mark Baker points to a really interesting application of REST to dynamic networks of small devices.

The primary mean of abstraction within pREST is a resource. Virtually anything that can be uniquely addressed with a URL is a resource: devices, services, and configurations as well as documents, pictures, and raw data. Resources can be nested, so that services and properties of a component being associated with URL are resources themselves.

Bay Area Adventures

I will be at the SEM SIG meeting tomorrow night in Palo Alto to hear Mary Poppendieck talk about Lean Software Development (see quote below). Then Thursday I'll be at the Infoworld SOA conference in San Francisco.

Jon Udell, Phil Windley, and others will be at the conference, which should be worth the price of admission alone. Well, I got a free pass. So worth *more* than the price of admission!

I will be looking for entries to put on the ws-success wiki. The agenda looks good -- not just vendor fluff.

From Mary's abstract on Lean Software Development...

Lean Strategies for Software Development Leaders What do PatientKeeper, a hospital data management system, and Zara, a high fashion clothing chain, have in common with Dell Computer and Toyota Motor Corporation? All four companies are overwhelming their competition with a constant flood of new products that seem to be exactly what customers want, even as they set the standard for quality and value. How do they do it? To these companies, Lean Thinking is a way of life: Customer Value, Rapid Response, Constant Learning, Built-in Quality and Engaged Workers are part of the culture.

Open Source and/or Standards

Jon Udell, et al. wonder about the value of open source and/or standards.

I would hesitate to adopt any standard that does not already have a up-to-date open source implementation. And I would refuse to define a standard without concurrently defining an open source implementation.

I've been involved in two standards definition processes. Neither had any significant implementation or formal model to guide them. I suspect other standardization efforts have suffered similar consequences.

Mistakes were made.

Bonne Chance

From Ajaxian...

Will Microsoft buy DabbleDB as they realise that it is what Office Live should be?

Jini and Javaspaces -- Distributed Systems Secret Sauce?

From the SOA Yahoo group, Greg Wonderly writes about Jini and Javaspaces...

One of the primary issues we have in the Jini community, at large, is that the Sun Jini team has commented in private that there are many different users of Jini which do not wish to have public recognition. Some developers have told me that Jini provided such an large, positive impact on the development and systems, for such a small investment, that they consider it a competative advantage that they don't want to talk about. I.e. it was so cheap and easy to use that their competitors would be able to be on par with them quickly.

ws-success

I have created a wiki, http://ws-success.pbwiki.com, for capturing and refining success stories about implementing distributed systems with technologies that follow ws-* standards (SOAP, WSDL, etc.)

Please feel encouraged to capture your success stories there or contribute to the stories that may already be there by adding your experience with an existing story, technology, or standard that may be part of that success.

Feel free to leave questions about the stories too, but please respect the content that may already be in place. Don't edit someone else's story unless you are contributing to a faithful rendering of a common experience.

Follow the changes with the RSS feed or the Atom feed.

Fun (and Learning) with SVG

Firefox 1.5 now supports SVG, if you've not heard the news. You can see this in action on a fun learning page about orbits and how our moon may have been created.

Next Move in Programming

Dave Thomas (the Smalltalk Dave Thomas) writes in JOT...

We need to move beyond the complexity, limitations and weaknesses of Smalltalk and Lisp but seek a language with at least as simple a syntax and more expressiveness.

Here's a programming leader who knows his stuff and I love the fact that he refers to Smalltalk and Lisp as being complex, and having limitations and weaknesses. These are not the be-all and end-all even though they are better than anything that's come along since their invention 35-45 years ago. Noodle on that: 35-45 years without a significant leap forward in programming languages.

Maybe we'll go another 100 years without that improvement. Maybe that is to be expected.

ws-success

I have created a wiki, http://ws-success.pbwiki.com, for capturing and refining success stories about implementing distributed systems with technologies that follow ws-* standards (SOAP, WSDL, etc.)

Please feel encouraged to capture your success stories there or contribute to the stories that may already be there by adding your experience with an existing story, technology, or standard that may be part of that success.

Feel free to leave questions about the stories too, but please respect the content that may already be in place. Don't edit someone else's story unless you are contributing to a faithful rendering of a common experience.

Follow the changes with the RSS feed or the Atom feed.

Get to the Point: Open Source Speech to Text

Update: Jon Udell happened to know where to find the information I was listening for. And created the excerpt.

Lisa describes how to use WebDAV to lock events, multiple events, access control, etc. Then she explains that a narrow number of features are needed specifically for calendering, e.g. how to query free/busy information on someone's calendar.

I sure wish I knew whether Lisa thinks we need a DAV extension for every kind of resource. Assuming not, why are calendars special? I think we need *conventions* for using HTTP per se to do versioning, locking, accessing, calendaring. I certainly hope we don't need extensions for every kind of resource. Oops. Isn't that like SOAP?

End Update

I am listening to a podcast, something I have done only a couple of times because I would much rather read than listen. In this case it is IT Conversations with Lisa Dusseault on calendering, CalDAV, and WebDAV.

What I most want is to know whether the question comes up as to why WebDAV and CalDAV are necessary. The logical conclusion of this approach is every resource on the web has its own application protocol... PurchaseOrderDAV, MovieDAV, ShinyObjectDAV, etc.

I don't have the time to listen to 30 minutes of conversation to see if this comes up. So I am on the lookout for a relatively easy to use and free or open source speech to text conversions.

Stasis

Alan Kay paraphrased by Phil Windley...

The future five years out is easy to predict because all of the forces acting on computer science are trying to keep it the same as it is now...

Architecture demands arches...

[People's] stories are inconsistent with what they know, yet they persist in believing them, even though they have the knowledge that contradicts their theory.

When people react instantly, they’re not thinking, they’re doing a table lookup...

To do creative work in computing, you must get past what you think is normal. Write down the 20 things you think are true of computing and try to demolish them...

Most people who graduate with CS degrees don’t understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. Alan’s breakthrough in object oriented programming, wasn’t objects, it was the realizing the the Lisp metasystem was what we needed...

Barton taught me “The basic principle of recursive design is making the parts as powerful as the whole.” These ideas led me to an insight on November 11, 1966: the timesharing people got it right with processes, but it was too big.

Wonderfully Empty

In my house there is a cave
And in the cave is nothing at all
Pure and wonderfully empty
Resplendent, with a light like the sun.

- Han shan

Daily Zen

Pig Pile

Bill de hÓra writes (but I transposed it into a question)...

...where could [you] point to a solution and say WS-* was critical to success[?]

And then more...

As for XSD it just does not seem to be helpful. I think that has to do with not only XSD being complicated (due to a requirements creep toward genericity that resulted in something of a monster spec). It's also quite low-level, and in practical terms tends to expose a platform's type system, which is invariably implementation specific. Which is to say there's an encapsulation problem when using XSD - too much how, not enough what. It would be cleaner to expose domain level structures like "Customer" that obey a RELAX or RDF schema...

There is one nice feature about the REST or XML-over-HTTP approach - you can definitely scale down. Scaling down is important because if you can't scale down you presumably have to start big, which is risky for any project, unless you believe big working systems derive form big working systems...

XMPP rocks. Publicly the fuss around XMPP will be in the commercial sector - about Google Talk and Voice Over IM. I think it could quietly become the "other" protocol for the get-it-done school of systems integrations, mainly in situations where push or timeliness is a serious need, and people are talking crazy talk, like long haul JMS integrations.

This is Enterprise Stuff. Look Out

A comment on Bill de hÓra's blog from Mike Champion continues the theme of wizards hiding complexity reining supreme...

...the paying customers in my world DEMAND that intellisense and databinding stuff that people in the web geek world think is gratuitous fluff.

Intellisense and code generation is an isolated developer trick for hiding real complexity and risk. This has nothing to do with architecture, maintainability, interoperability, etc.

If that is the reason for choosing SOAP/WSDL then... it really is over.

It also remains to be seen whether RELAX NG, RDF Schema, etc. are also just simpler tools for simpler jobs than XSD, or really do more with less. I'd be extremely happy to be proven wrong that XSD is a necessary evil!

Yes, why list actual reasons why XSD is good when you can just claim the top of the hill and dare people to knock you off. I think you might fall down on your own.

Customer-Driven Design or Not

Scott Bellware writes in the Test-Driven Development Yahoo group...

Sweet mother of God! MS TDD® is back! :)

I recently got an update on the revision to the Guidelines for Test- Driven Development article on MSDN. An actual TDD practitioner was tapped to write the second rev of the article. I learned that the product folks weren't overly pleased with a more accurate depiction of TDD as it didn't promote the VSTS testing features that they had worked so hard on.

That'll learn 'em. Or not.

If it keeps on raining...

The levee is going to break. Steve Loughran contributes more to the discussion I was hoping to see. I would like to see some constructive counter-arguments. Where are they?

Let it not be said that I critique SOAP/WSDL and the like for ideological grounds. I critique it because I have to use it, and it sucks...

One of the key features is that its easy to debug HTTP problems: point a web page at the same URL, and see what you get back. Work with SOAP, and you are doing tracelogs...

We cannot reliably send an xsd:dateTime between two endpoints on the same machine without its timezone getting confused, attachments are something you need to negotiate on, and nobody even understands why xsd:nil actually exists, since its a way of declaring inline "I choose to break this bits of the public schema, get over it"...

In REST-land, few people work with XSD, even less try to seamlessly map from the schema to native types, and nobody expects the runtime to infer a REST state model from implementation classes. Yet despite the lack of all this integration, REST appears to work better...

Just as Hibernate killed EJB-classic, so can lightweight protocols kill WS-*...

Use XMPP as the back channel. Not WS-Eventing, or WS-Notification. Or let people poll. It actually works quite well when the number of polling clients is very low, as it probably is for most communications between two nodes, and it works around the whole firewall problem...

...kill WS-Addressing. WS-A is the recurring bane of my life. People ask me why, and I have to point them at code that tries to move data to and from the various versions of wsa:epr on the wire. URLs, that's all you should need. If you want async two-way comms, then give a URL for responses; an xmpp: one for xmpp responses...

Bad Idea

Robert Sayre makes the point that it really is over after all...

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see it was a bad idea to try and abstract away application protocols using RPC calls tied to verbose, rigid, statically-typed languages mapped with a Rube Goldberg schema language that has a more flexible type system than said languages...

If you have Microsoft saying "well, the best approach is to make this elaborate infrastructure we've spent billions of dollars building out optional", then the debate is over.

Update: More about this bad idea. First, Tim Bray writes about either WS-angst or WS-flurry or both...

I think the WS-stench of something WS-rotting from the WS-head down is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

OK, not much information there but a telling satire on the WS-mess. But Dare Obasanjo informs us...

The main problem with WS-* interop is that vendors decided to treat it as a distributed object programming technology but based it on a data typing language (i.e. XSD) which does not map at all well with traditional object oriented programming languages. On the other hand, if you look at other XML-Web-Services-as distributed-objects technology like XML-RPC, you don't see as many issues. This is because XML-RPC was meant to map cleanly to traditional object oriented programming languages.

I think this has a ring of truth. XML-RPC for all its flaws is fairly modest and easy to implement. The data model is not unlike JSON, again really modest and easy to implement. JSON is even better because it is just a data representation and can just use plain HTTP.

Truth

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

-Umberto Eco

History

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

-H.G. Wells

Merit

"In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."

-Stephen Jay Gould

Don't Make Me Think

"Don't Make Me Think" may be a fine motto for user interface design. Unfortunately, this seems to be the preference of developers promoting the SOAP/WSDL/IDE approach. As Mark Baker points out, the result is not an architecture based on principles. The choice appears to be driven by convenience. A C# or java programmer can point and click their way to non-interoperable code generation almost without thinking.

Look around the net for the architecture principles for SOAP/WSDL. Then look around for HTTP/POX. It's like night and day. Maybe an architecture isn't required if all you need to do is point and click within a single IDE and toolkit.

From what I can tell the problem with interop is:

• The SOAP/WSDL solution space is big, far bigger than HTTP.
• Each vendor seems to be in it for their own benefit rather than the benefit of the whole.

There is no way the web could work under those conditions and it appears the WS-* world is not working well under those conditions. Vendors might have trouble differentiating themselves under simpler conditions though. The HTTP advocates are essentially saying an open source system like Apache, or simpler still, is sufficient. The vendors are between a rock and a hard place.

Simple dynamic programming languages and simple dynamic coordination languages are winning. Vendors will have to differentiate themselves on something more than wizards that mask complexity.

The China Syndrome

For some reason the search engine business is not supposed to profit from China's poor support for human rights. Meanwhile the rest of us are able to do business under their current conditions in the name of "democratizing" their country.

Right.

Java and SOAP/WSDL

Philippe Mougin writes in a comment on Don Box's blog...

I'm quite surprised by Don Box's comment about SOAP/WSDL providing a great experience to Java folks. JAX-RPC (the standard Java API for using SOAP and WSDL) is known to be a terrible API...

Several years ago I used a fairly nice SOAP toolkit called Glue. I recently worked with SOAP again for the first time since then. This time around we tried Glue, Axis2, and another based on JAX. Glue remains by far the nicest and yet still presented problems with interoperability even among Java toolkits as well as various dotnet toolkits.

Web Methods owns Glue now. I don't know how well they've incorporated Glue into the rest of their products. They seem to bury Glue per se deeply in their web site for some reason.

Dyanamic Languages, Part L

Lisp implementations are nearly 50 years old! The ideas go back publicly 50 years to John McCarthy's participation in the Dartmouth AI project in 1956. By 1960, McCarthy had reported publicly on his team's implementation experience.

Here is a two-line status report on dynamic languages 50 years later, quoting from another blog in another debate...

• If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP.
• If you want a great experience for LAMP folks, you’ll support POX messages and will provide a non-XSD description of your formats.

And so I would summarize the status of dynamic languages like this: they are mainstream, they are everywhere, and they are so misunderstood.

Update: Phil Windley has some recent items on Lisp.

REST and SOAP

Don Box on REST vs. SOAP...

In hopes I never have to address this debate again...

The debate seems just to be getting started and has a long way to go. I hope Microsoft has not made up their minds yet.

The following design decisions are orthogonal, even though people often conflate two or more of them...

1. Whether one uses SOAP or POX (plain-old-XML).
2. Whether or not one publishes an XML schema for their formats.
3. Whether or not one generates static language bindings from an XML schema.
4. The degree to which one relies on HTTP-specific features. That stated, screw with GET at your peril.
5. Whether one adopts a message-centric design approach or a resource-centric design approach.

Some of the decisions (specifically 5) are architectural and sometimes philosophical.

What does "philisophical" mean? Does "philisophical" mean "does not count"?

Some of the decisions (specifically 1-2) are simple business decisions that are determined by who your target audience is.

What does "simple business decision" mean? (Let's ignore the "simple" part and just consider "business".) I can understand the decisions could have a value and a cost associated with them. But which ones would not?

1. If you want a great experience for .NET/Java devs, you’ll typically publish schemas (through wsdl) and support SOAP.
2. If you want a great experience for LAMP folks, you’ll support POX messages and will provide a non-XSD description of your formats.
3. If you want to reach both audiences, you’ll do both #1 and #2.
4. If you want to reach both audiences before your competition does, you'll avoid indulging in religious debates and ship something.

Starting with (1), what does "great experience" mean? Great *initial* experience? And does that slash mean dotnet *or* java? Or does it mean dotnet *and* java together?

My recent experience (in which I was shocked how little interoperability, not to mention functionality, has been accomplished in the WSDL and SOAP world over the last several years) tells me that if the target is either dotnet *or* java then your chances are significantly better than targetting both. (But then if separate, the questions becomes again *why* WSDL and SOAP when a proprietary solution could do better still.

Doing (3) seems like a lot of work when perhaps (2) would work well for all. Again my recent experience supports that. I think (1) works for vendors whose tools have been aimed at (1) but only *initially*. What little experience I have in this area has even so raised huge warning flags that the initial joy of a dotnet or java SOAP and WSDL toolkit very soon runs out of gas (i.e. I have not seen quantifiable benefits for choosing WSDL and SOAP over real HTTP), yet introduces problems of its own (complexity, lack of interop, little support for versioning, magic instead of repeatability, little in the way of testability).

That last one about shipping something is interesting. In a recent experiment a small group and I found ourselves wrestling a lot with WSDL and SOAP (this was a dotnet *and* java experiment rather than a dotnet *or* java experiment). Wanting to quickly put that behind us, we decided to run a different experiment... address the same business problem but with just HTTP. Very soon we were spending all our time talking about business functionality and messages rather than infrastructure headaches.

And yes, we could have at that time very easily thrown in LAMP, Lisp, Smalltalk, Erlang, etc. Anything that can do simple HTTP could be a full participant. The interfaces were narrowed and became a non-issue. The messages and the funcationality became the concern -- what is the business functionality? what is the message description? (We used xsd's and so I can attest to the above statement about schemas being independent of SOAP, WSDL, etc.)

Mark Baker has additional useful comments and pointers to other recent items (here and here for example) about this debate. To repeat myself, this seems far from over, and neither should it be. There is a lot more to discuss. The lists above from Don seem oversimplified. From his accompanying text, he seems too eager to conclude with this list and live by it. I don't see how that would help anyone.

Update: Mike Champion makes an analogy between messaging technologies (SOAP/WSDL and HTTP) and road vehicle types (trucks and cars). Unfortunately this is an arbitrary analogy. That is, saying that SOAP/WSDL is best "to haul a lot of heavy stuff securely and reliably, use a truck" does not make it so. The question is how to make an objective determination.

Update Day 3: As Chris Ferris says, the saga continues. Chris plays the "if only you knew what I know" card. That could be a good card to play, as I am only reporting what little I know. That is not much, but at least it is based on hands-on experiments.

But Chris appears to advocate SOAP/WSDL over HTTP on the basis of reliable messaging. Here's my (limited) experience... several popular SOAP/WSDL toolkits fail to easily interop over HTTP using unreliable messaging. Should I come back in a few years to see where they stand on reliable messaging? Chris admits...

I will concede that it is taking longer than I might like to drive the WS-* specifications through the standards process.

Yet the standards that are in place already seem open to arbitrarily incompatible interpretations. And the toolkits I have seen appear to do the darnedest things to generate complicated code and require programmers to jump through obscure hoops without a net.

Chris -- promises of paradise sometime in the future may come true, but I don't see that as a reason to invest in the mess we're forced to deal with today.

Stefan Tilkov writes...

If you’re talking about SOA at an enterprise level... whether you end up doing POX over HTTP in a RESTful or unRESTful way, or use WSDL and SOAP with a code-first or contract-first approach, is not the sort of thing that matters...

But he seems to agree there is a significant technical debate. I'm not sure I agree the technical debate does not matter at the enterprise level. The most significant enterprise IT issue I am aware of is the inability to get out from under undesirable technical legacies. My fear is the current SOAP/WSDL, etc. conglomeration is not a wedge for loosening older legacies, but could turn out to be its own significant layer of cruft that drains more resources from focusing on pure business value.

On reliability, security, etc. within the enterprise, Mike Champion in a comment on his blog writes...

Typical enterprise IT shops tend see the Web as a necessary evil to communicate with customers, and must invest heavily in tools and expertise to get acceptable security / reliability; they generally use databases or enterprise message oriented middleware (e.g. MQ) to handle internal communications securely and reliably.

And I agree with this observation. I can see a place within the enterprise for HTTP as well as for some other API or protocol-based database and messaging systems. I don't see HTTP as being the only protocol, especially within an enterprise. However I don't see SOAP/WSDL at *this* point adding value to any of these. Experience shows they are complicated, vague, and underdeveloped (relative to what the adopted and in-progress specifications might lead you to believe.)

Each has their place... but where? Kurt Cagle adds to the discussion. He makes a statement I have heard before, "both have their place". I don't recall seeing useful information about where these appropriate places are for SOAP/WSDL. Some people think they belong between enterprises. Others believe they belong within an enterprise. Kurt appears to uphold the latter at least in part, but I am not sure.

My sense from limited hands-on experience is that the more one's interfaces depend on SOAP and WSDL the more difficult they will be to change. I would be interested in contrary experiences. The last thing an IT shop needs is more cruft that is difficult to change.

Update Day 4: Dare Obasanjo makes constructive observations until he falls back to the apparently default advice...

If you know the target platform of the consumers of your service is going to be .NET or some other platform with rich WS-* support then you should use SOAP/WSDL/WS-*. On the other hand, if you can't guarantee the target platform of your customers then you should build a Plain Old XML over HTTP (POX/HTTP) or REST web service.

Again the "rich" support appears to hold if one does not care about interop. But then the question is, why use SOAP/WSDL for a non-interop scenario? Certainly there are better solutions when confined to just C# or java.

Concurrency-Oriented Programming

Peter Williams needs a look at Erlang and its take on Concurrency-Oriented Programming (pdf slides, pdf paper)...

My gut tells me that none of the approaches I know for apparent concurrency are going to work well for a highly concurrent application on highly concurrent hardware. If that is the case we will see something new and different as soon as the cool hardware gets into circulation. (via James Robertson)

On the other hand I don't see everyone cutting rope and heading over to Erlang. Probably some languages will evolve concurrency mechanisms. Those that are able to evolve most easily will be the simpler dynamic languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, and Ruby.

On the way I would expect simpler extralingual concurrency mechanisms to gain popularity, e.g. JavaSpaces, esp. in the form of cross-language tuple spaces.

Where We Stand

From SDForum via xmlgrrl...

Harold: Web services is where we would have been 10 years ago if MSFT had joined OMG.

Andrew: You’re giving us too much credit.

Oh, was that a compliment?

Structured Speech

Given that I have listened to no more than three podcasts and have found no more than one useful, I would have to agree with Werner Vogels' desire for more navigational structure.

I believe my main problem with the format is you are supposed to use it linearly. I love to read articles, papers, books, etc., but I am often a non-linear reader. I will scan back and forth for interesting pieces. The fact that you cannot build a hierarchical model of a podcast for selective drill down is pretty annoying to me...

It is not that I want everything written down... I believe more structure would be absolutely helpful.

I would probably pay more attention to podcasts if they were written down. 8^(