Missing the Inflection Point

A point worth pondering...

"Avalon is to Microsoft as microchannel was to IBM."

Time will only tell. I think there are significant problems with nearly every aspect of Longhorn. But that's from a technical perspective. The continuing flury caused by Joel Spolsky's insightful analysis of factions inside Microsoft originated and is supposed to be about the customer and about business.

Microsoft has been better about business than anyone else in the software industry. I have no qualifications to argue with that.

I can't help observing however that the responses from the MSDN camp I've read almost completely miss Spolsky's argument. (McLaws, Box, Wes)

Excercise for the reader: determine which camp *you* belong to. Can you overcome cognitive dissonance and identify three of Joel's significant points that are being missed in the three responses linked above?

Shell tries to come clean

Let's see where this goes...

The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".

In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says... "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."...

His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.

"You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.

Misinterpreting the CMM

Andy Hunt misinterprets the intent of CMM. (But then most of us do.)

The CMM, and even better the CMMI Continuous Representation, is an approach toward incremental process improvement and measuring their progress. Most organizations would not benefit from considering more than a level 3 assessment, and even then only in specific process areas.

This approach to process improvement is incremental. The XP/agile approach is radical. They are neither one ideal, and in fact more complementary than proponents of either tend to realize.

I'd recommend "Making Process Improvement Work" by Potter and Sakry to anyone who wants to understand how to use CMMI, or process improvement generally, effectively.

Reinterpreting Databases

Charles Miller explains why we need better interpretations of the concept of "database".

First International REA Technology Workshop

REA (Resources-Events-Agents) originated as an accounting model. Early on it's application has been with computing. Significant applications of REA have been extended out to inter-enterprise supply chains.

And now there are some interesting results from the First International REA Technology Workshop.

Several participants from Microsoft Business Solutions.

Saved!

From Roger Ebert's move review...

"Saved!" is an important film as well as an entertaining one. At a time when the FCC is enforcing a censorious morality on a nation where 8.5 million listeners a day are manifestly not offended by Howard Stern, here is a movie with a political message: Jesus counseled more acceptance and tolerance than some of his followers think. By the end of the movie, mainstream Christian values have not been overthrown, but demonstrated and embraced. Those who think Christianity is just a matter of enforcing their rulebook have been, well, enlightened. And that all of this takes place in a sassy and smart teenage comedy is, well, a miracle.

"Saved!" is a good satire, approaching greatness. It is a true *satire* half-disguised as a teen movie.

What's really amazing is how little protest has accompanied it on it's way to theaters. How did this get to the mainstream cineplex so quietly?

If you need a Passionate (and laugh-out-loud) antidote to your local megachurch, this is it.

Memes we live by

What makes us (software developers) think most other disciplines are "predictable, schedule-able, reliable, budget-able and robust"?

Making Money with ReST and Smalltalk

From the on-line presentations to Smalltalk Solutions 2004 (PDF)...

A financial house posts trades to NASDAQ using HTTPS client and SSL framework.

• Saves $5000/month over using an MQSeries link to NASDAQ.
• No manual entry. HTML pages are automatically read, filled in, and posted. Report retrieval is automated as well.
• Other companies are still using MQSeries and struggling to manually enter data within the 45 min NASDAQ requirement.
• Implemented in less than a month and running for over a year.

Are Java and dotnet communities like Unix and Windows?

Ted Neward writes...

It's funny, in a way: it's almost as if Java has too much disagreement and disunity within its community, and .NET not enough.

I wonder how much this comes from Java having multiple strong vendors while dotnet has but one. Isn't this like the Unix and Windows communities? Multiple Unix vendors are going to disagree and so divide the communities to a more significant degree than the single Windows vendor.

With a Microsoft product, you accept the faults and go with it. There is at least a perception of no other choice, at least not without some significant compromise. Vendors of other "standards" have to find ways to differentiate and still conform.

Does Microsoft Software Evolve Well?

Ralph Johnson comments on my piece about Microsoft's O/R mapping fiasco...

I think that Microsoft has perfected the notion that software has to evolve. They release early and often. The joke is that their software is never ready until version 3, and I've heard people from Microsoft tell that joke. I don't know the issues behind what you are saying about ADO.NET and Longhorn, but whatever the problem, it is not because Microsoft in general thinks that software will not evolve. When I talk with people from Microsoft, they seem much more aware than most that everything they do is transitory.

Maybe we'd have to discuss specific examples. I don't think Object Spaces is a good example of "release early and often". As I wrote previously, Microsoft is very late to the table with an O/R product. Even now that product is being pushed out, apparently to 2007 at the earliest.

Taking the subject of database connections more broadly, the Microsoft picture looks even worse. They have a history of introducing replacement connection technologies rather than finding a suitable abstraction that can evolve.

These various API's are transitory but they don't seem to be evolutionary. I won't fault Microsoft for packaging software and selling it successfully, and that includes getting software out early and improving it. But when it comes to software design, abstraction, and loose coupling of components, they seem to be getting worse rather than better.

Maybe that's the right approach: put everything into Longhorn, and force and upgrade. Or maybe it's just an accident of bad planning and design. Or maybe it's something else altogether. I don't know, but it doesn't seem evolutionary.

Dining Philospohers and ReST

The discussion on ReST and coordination continues with a really interesting example of the Dining Philosophers.

*All* things considered?

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has taken a look at National Public Radio...

Characterized by conservative critics as "liberal" radio, NPR has more Republican than Democratic voices, and male sources outnumber female sources by nearly four to one.

For example and for example.

But don't get me wrong. I am *not* in favor of a government broadcasting company.

Big Bang?

Another kind of big bang...

Using estimates based on existing research, the five researchers calculated that the energy released by the asteroid strike was equivalent to that in 100 million megatons of TNT. The force of the impact would have thrown debris high into the air, much of it burning up while still in the atmosphere, the report said. This, in turn, would have turned the Earth into a giant broiler oven.

Jeffrey Ullman's Courseware

Yahoo... er... great! Jeffrey Ullman's courseware.

What sells?

A comment from Adam V. on why complicated stuff like Share Point is productized, but something as simply beautiful as a Wiki is not as easily productized.

In response I think this is a two-sided coin, with a customer as well as a vendor.

I think there is something to the "monetizing" argument.

I think it also comes from the customer side... I continue to see a lot of behavior in large enterprises that seems to believe anything of *value* (not just cost, mind you) should by definition be big, complicated, and even cumbersome.

Really. I think the portal vendors, like other kinds of vendors, are just capitalizing on these behaviors. "Selling" something as simple as a Wiki, or even as simple as Smalltalk, is *more* difficult than selling the more complicated and costly approximations.

Reading vs. Taking

Mark Baker, in his comment to my "Is this ReST?" post, suggests "take" isn't often needed...

My machine's offline today, but I responded last night; yah, the unsafe GET isn't such a hot idea. And to add/respond to what Bill said, I'm finding that one often doesn't need TAKE semantics at all; just support indexing, e.g. /queue/?start=1&end=10, safe retrieval via GET, queueing of the documents for as long as you want/need to, flushing the old stuff after that point, and then returning 410 when asked to return a flushed document. Not totally general, but it's worked for me on a couple of occasions.

This could be so in a queue where there is one consumer or where multiple consumers have an agreed-upon policy for avoiding double consumption.

In the general case though, FIFO queues are just one desirable coordination model...

Is this ReST?

Is this implementation of queueing a good example of the ReST approach?

Mark?

In particular I am wondering about the use of GET to dequeue an item. My understanding of how GET should behave is contrary to this. That is, two consecutive GET's with the same URL should have the same result, assuming no intervening POST, DELETE, or PUT that would affect that URL.

Corrections or corroborations appreciated.

The problem with Share Point (and most "portals")

I love the way I can shape a Wiki to provide a "narrative" that is still a "web".

Why does Share Point (and portals in general from what I have seen) provide a sterile, partitioned, austere "user interface" experience?

Clearly the best of the web is based on self-navigable "narratives". Maybe there is a way to do this in Share Point, if I had the time to discover more about it.

If there is, this should certainly be the default behavior.

"Entity Aggregation" (i.e. data) and SOA

From the MSFT dotnet Architecture Center, "SOA Challenges: Entity Aggregation".

Speak of the devil. Another view on the SOA "data problem".

See for example the sections on "Cross Entity Queries" and "Entity Aggregation Service". Then the paper proceeds into some useful solution approaches.

We need a great utility player, not a specialist

Clemens Vasters on a pure message-based architecture vs. data-based integration...

It will make your architecture infinitely more agile...

Time will tell. I think the crux of the matter will be to determine where database integration makes sense, and where messaging integration does.

Again, I think there is a fundamental flaw in message-oriented architectures that can be addressed by improving the database-oriented architecture. We need agile databases as much as we need messages and events.

Good database design is a start. Manageable data platforms are required. Tuple spaces offer some insight too. They provide significantly more expressiveness than relational databases or message buses. A tuple space is like a great utility player in baseball.

I think "pure" SOA is SOL. The buzzword is actually a buzzkill. There will be long lessons learned where the victors will be SOA-based ERPs like SAP Netweaver and Microsoft's Business Framework (MBF apparently being horribly behind at this point). Yes, these systems are "SOA" but they also provide a data-based integration as well.