Partially-baked ideas and commentary on technology and society.
I continue to think the trend towards treating the RDBMS as a dumb indexed filesystem is rather ridiculous. So, here's a rant, coming from an old Data Warehousing guy with an Oracle Certified Professional past, who also happens to be a web developer, distributed systems guy, etc. Witness the blogosphere reaction to DeWitt and Stonebraker's recent critique of MapReduce. I thought Stonebraker's…
I've been hearing a lot about how the RDBMS are no longer appropriate for data management on the Web. I'm curious about this. Future users of megadata should be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the computing cloud. A prompting service which supplies such information is not a satisfactory solution. Activities of users through web browsers and most application programs…
From (the otherwise great book) Advanced Rails , under Ch. 10, "Rails Deployment"... "The canonical Rails answer to the scalability question is shared-nothing (which really means shared-database): design the system so that nearly any bottleneck can be removed by adding hardware." Nonsensical, but cute. This seems like a classic case of Semantic Diffusion . It's funny how people find a buzzword,…
Ganesh : Believe me, it would greatly clear the air if a REST advocate sat down and listed out things in SOAP/WS-* that were �good� and worth adopting by REST. It would not weaken the argument for REST one bit, and it would reassure non-partisans like myself that there are reasonable people on both sides of the debate. I'll bite. I'll look at what I think are "good", what the improvements could be…
Some comments on this and that , because JJ's comments truncate at 3000. - "Talking with Subbu, I think I understand the disconnect. He works for Yahoo (same would be true for Amazon, Google, Microsoft Live...). For these people, who operate vast data centers, every CPU cycle counts. It speaks directly to their user base: if yahoo is sluggish people will switch to Google and vice versa. I, on the…
I mean, I really like the idea of Amazon's SimpleDB . Auto-indexing is great. Scalable is great. The price is great. Forget that their REST API is a joke that will have to change as soon as people start losing or corrupting their data. Why the fuck are they throwing out relational theory? The database barely even supports 1st normal form! You can't do any kind of aggregate operation -- no count,…
This entry is a response to this entry from JJ . The first part of this is a rant of frustration. The second part is a discussion about the use for choreography in RESTful services. [RANT] "These were the only two people that had the courage to go to the end of the discussion even though they saw some limitations to the REST approach. Others, have stopped all communication as soon as they…
In reading Gary Taubes' new book Good Calories, Bad Calories , along with his recent UC Berkeley webcast , he drew my attention to the great and quotable Claude Bernard , who was the father of the science of medicine, and the man who discovered homeostasis. Some quotes I think are quite worthy of reflection: "Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science." "A…
Monsieur Dubray has posted nearly 5 blog entries critical about REST. Almost everything Mr. Dubray claims "you're on your own" with REST is either a tremendous misunderstanding, an emotionally projected argument, confuses implementation technologies with protocol-based interoperability (e.g. SCA and SDO are jokes until it binds to the Microsoft stack, JJ), or it is in area where you're equally on…
Why is RESTful design thought to be hard? I said this during Sanjiva's talk at QCon, but here's my one line summary RESTful design is like relational data normalization. Even though both are driven by principles, both are an art, not a science. And the popular alternatives, unfortunately, tend to be driven by craft and expediency. The analogy could be taken further: "good RESTful designs" today,…
The REST track, hosted by Stefan , was great fun -- Floyd mentioned to me that the track in London wasn't so packed, but the room in San Fran was standing-room only for some of the talks. Stefan has rough notes of most of the proceedings on his site, so here are my reflections. Steve Vinoski's talk was a good introduction to the crowd on REST's constraints and the desirable properties brought out…
Kent Beck gave the first keynote speech at QCon, which was a good talk on the trend towards honest relationships, transparency, and sustainable commitments in software development: the "agile way" is aligned with the broader business trends like Sarbanes-Oxley, greater transparency, board and management accountability, etc.. He claimed during the keynote (I'm paraphrasing): "Agility is an attitude…
End of an Era ... "So after the show, the SOA advocates shuffled off to meet with Michael and I for a spot of coffee and confrontation.... During a relaxed and wide ranging conversation exploring resource oriented versus message based architectures, I suddenly realised, there was no argument anymore. Getting all those silly vendors to agree on �something, anything� was the battle, but going…
Technology moves quickly? bah! From: Stuart Charlton <stuartcharlton@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: [dist-obj] Was Souls, Now S2S, P2P.. Web Services Date: February 28, 2001 5:26:53 PM EST (CA) To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> Cc: dist-obj@distributedcoalition.org > Stu! Mark! > It looks to me like you're only considering the RPC use of SOAP. SOAP > is so much more than RPC, but also so much less than…
Here are the slides from me and Mark Baker's half-day OOPSLA tutorial. It's a slightly different twist on the "why and when is REST useful?" question. Here's a motivating paper we also wrote -- it's on GooDocs but I've provided a local link for now.