License 2 Code

I spent last night looking into Restlet; the brainchild of Jérôme Louvel. My first impression is that the code is solid and is a faithful implementation of Rest concepts on the Java platform. I’ve started integrating it into a project I’m working on and will report back as I learn more. So far, my biggest stumbling block isn’t the software, but instead learning how to architect software using only rest.

It appears that a major part of rest is transporting representations between the client and the server. For example, to update an attribute of a resource, the client PUTs the resource onto the server using the appropriate URL. The simplicity is compelling. But, I’m very concerned about pushing complexity onto the client as a consequence of this simplicity. Stay tuned.

I just ordered what I presume to be two wildly different books:

• Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services
• The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage

Ben Edwards introduced me to Guy’s books.
Scott Mark and James McGovern are both endorsing thie Power of Process. From Scott’s blog:

This is an interesting title - it’s a work of business fiction that helps explain some of the thinking, language, and acronyms around SOA and BPM in a lighthearted manner.  If you are a developer or just interested in technical reading this book is not for you.  However if you are a manager, enterprise architect, or another type who needs to either learn more about those topics at a high level or get some talking points to talk to a less technical audience then this book is for you.  It’s a refreshing change from a lot of drier technical books and a quick read.

I don’t know if Simon can code or not, but I have to give him this highest honor (rockstar coder) after reviewing my week at the Colorado Software Summit. His keynote, “Whose Freedom? Aspects of Software Freedom” was easily my favorite due to his straightforward demeanor, easy, chat-style presentation, and intelligent treatment of an important topic.

Ahhh, finally a SOA book for the C-level execs everywhere. I’m reminded of SOAFacts number three: ‘SOA is not complex. You are just dumb.’

I’m excited about JRuby for all the standard reasons, and the move of the JRuby team-leads to Sun is a great sign. But somethings been eating at me. Java has a language specification. Ruby does not. Java’s language specification opens the platform for some types of innovation/differentiation. Think Jikes.

Now back to JRuby. Ruby is covered by a significant amount of unit tests. The JRuby guys (Charles and Thomas) indicate that they have to reverse engineer a spec from the tests, and invoke a lot of brute force to get Ruby to run on the JVM. This seems problematic, but you could argue that once they get 100% test success, they’re good to go right?

I think you’d be wrong. What happens with the next version of Ruby? JRuby would be perpetually exposed to chasing the updates to Ruby. Do we expect Matz to keep JRuby in mind? I don’t think that’s entirely reasonable - not without a spec. Ruby is intended to be terse, elegant, convenient and powerful. Running on the JVM is not a core requirement.

I don’t think this spells doom, but my flag is raised, and I’d be curious to hear about how my analysis is incorrect, or what might be done (or is being done) to address this.

The Semantic Web will feed the hungry and bring world peace. A trusted friend talked up the semantic web over three years ago. ‘We should learn all we can and be expert consultants when this thing blows big!’ I didn’t invest much time, and I think its fair to say it hasn’t blown big. Now there may be a number of reasons why this hasn’t come to pass.

Back then, and still now - I had one major concern. The semantic web seems highly dependent on disparate groups with competitive advantage at stake coming to together around a standard, unified ‘knowledge’ model for a given domain. That’s not a technical problem, and yet seems very problematic in this day and age.

I was glad to hear Soyring’s keynote, where he described how IBM has targeted 17 strategic industries (two examples - shipping and payment systems) for system development. There was a hint that one part of this is working out a domain/data model standard. That was encouraging. But I struggle to find other reasons to believe the issue can be resolved in many business domains.

At the Q and A last night - I asked whether Model Driven Architecture was dead. I personally think it never had life, but hearing none other than James Rumbaugh trumpet how IBM was going to breathe life into this in the last year made me want some confirmation on my opinion. The crickets I heard were confirmation enough. Thanks to Hermod for taking the question, as he’s been most active in this community tooting the MDA horn.

‘EJB 3.0 is a great example of a standards body chasing an innovator.’
- Ron Bodkin - nobody delivers a better ‘from-the-turnbuckle-bodyslam-I’ll-sit-down-now.’ Q and A response.

Ruby for Java Developers
Mike Bowler does a great job presenting on Ruby for Java Developers. We’ve heard a number of reasons for using the language, and readability is often high on the list. It was interesting to hear Mike riff briefly on his personal experience with Ruby - echoing prag Dave’s sentiments almost exactly - perl he’s written is foggy after a day, extremely difficult to come back to over longer timeframes. Ruby stays fresh and easy to read. Dave calls Ruby the ‘glue that never sets’. That would make perl the 60-second epoxy. I wonder whether Ruby sets slower compared to Groovy or Python…

Domain Driven Technology Migration
Principles/practices/reasons for extracting domain logic from framework. Dan Bergh Johnsson  did a spiffy walkthrough of a set of refactorings to extract domain logic from EJBs - migrating from EJB 2.x to spring. Well-done - good principles reinforced by the walkthrough. One great idea was utilizing a simple ‘domain-based’ example that everyone could understand: Bar night - a bar night with operations like putOnTab(Drink), getTab(), closeTab(). Its a toy example - but it really works - stripping away complexity of a real world example - and putting examples in terms that all could understand. It would be interesting to have a most-simple, universal example like this, and work it up in various languages and frameworks for demos and simple learning.

This week we’ve been inundated with talks at the CSS on LAMP and Rails. What our spies in the field are reporting is that Rails is fast replacing PHP in the coveted LAMP stack. Yes, this new stack is LAMR. But you probably knew that.

Today’s lunch at the Colorado Software Summit was Southwest Chicken Fajitas. The CSS boasts great community, great insights, and great food. You know what they say… “The way to a tech ninja’s heart is through his stomach.” We’ll assume they were referring to good food.

From Wikipedia - the infinite monkey theorem  states that “a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

Donald Smith’s excellent Open Source Licensing for Developers presentation stated copyright as a form of protection existing for original, minimally creative, tangible works of authorship.

Hmmm. This led me to posit the infinite server theorum, which states that “an infinite amount of servers generating random english word combinations will almost sure create all possible future written copyright-able works.” Post THAT on an infinite number of tangible web servers and I say cha-ching!

Amazon EC2 here I come.

The best thing I got out of the Q and A was SOA Facts.

Each night at the conference (Colorado Software Summit) a Q & A session is held. The concept is to be able to poll your fellow developers as well as expound on your favorite topic. Sometimes, an earnest dev will ask an honest question. I’ve heard good things about these in the past, but frankly have been less than enamored with the whole thing.

The topic tonight was SOA - Good or Bad. Frankly, it was an abstract and esoteric “dialog” on an abstract and esoteric topic. The highlight tonight was when a “defender of SOA” stated that services were anything that added value to the enterprise. An astute member of the crowd then grabbed the mic and said, “I add value to the enterprise. Does that mean I’m a service?” I would have been rolling on the floor if I hadn’t been crying in the corner at the time wondering when it would all end.

Challenge - should you choose to accept - define SOA striving to be both succint and grounded in reality.

Last night I attended Donald Smith’s (Eclipse Foundation) presentation on Open Source Licensing For Developers. In a nutshell, it was a treatment on IP, Patents, and Open Source licenses. Mr. Smith was a good speaker, knew the material, and presented a tricky topic in a very thorough and thoughtful manner. We’ll consider making him an honorary Spy if he keeps up the good work.

The Colorado Software Summit has a tradition called Q and A, where the entire attendee population gathers at the end of the day for a totally open-mike, free-for-all question and answer session. Its a great place to get a quick collective opinion, or hook up with an expert for a follow-up.

And sometimes is just great for lobbing some caustic bomb of a question. Like the Java v. Ruby/Rails question raised tonight… Read more »

We’re going to be posting our experiences and thoughts from the Colorado Software Summit 2006. It’s a highly technical Java, Web Services and Open Source programming conference. Stay Tuned.

In fact, IE7’s release hasn’t blipped a single time on Central Standard Tech (best tech blogs evah). I mean, I realize that we *webdevs* *dislike* IE. But, this is the first major upgrade in 5 years to a browser that’s used by 80-90% of the world. I’d expect a little link love.

So, cheers to IE7! Now go download Firefox.

IE Link Love:

Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure

Information on Reports of IE 7 Vulnerability

The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0

Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?)

A quick shoutout to Adobe and their Apollo project.

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Companies are beginning to look at RIAs and Ajax as the new GUI for their applications. The ability to serve a RIA in both a browser and as an application (think outside the browser window) will be a great advantage in leveraging existing in-house expertise. I know several third-parties have working versions of this.

Just got the November 2006 issue of Dr. Dobbs. The new Dr. Dobbs, not the classic programmer’s journal… From our bugged executive meeting room tapes* of CMP media ‘Let’s take two industry-standard, consistently good (for free) software monthlies, and merge them into one crappy excuse to fill the inboxes of tech cogs across America! [burrp] and pass the Cristal…’. Gone are the gnarly programming exercises on the Dr. Dobb’s side, columns by industry heavyweights like Robert Martin on the SD side. Ah what free-as-in-beer gets you these days… Lots of ads…

*pretend. All pretend.