Aehso’s Output

Lots of discussion in the past few weeks about the gap between REST/POX/Web2.0 and SOA/WS-*:

• Daryl Plummer stoked the fire with his Web Services at a Crossroads piece.
• Tim Bray suggests “Web Style” is a better moniker than “REST”. He also suggests the label “Web Service” should be taken out back and shot (haha).
• Joe McKendrick agrees that the SOA hype has gotten out of hand.
• Dion Hinchcliffe is still trying the align the two approaches and references yet-another-Gartner-acronym, “WOA” – Web Oriented Architecture.
• Tim Bray finally sums it all up by reiterating that he thinks this really is very important.

Thats a lot of clever folks trying to figure out how WOA will fit into the enterprise. It does seem likely to happen given past trend of internet technologies migrating into enterprises but at this early stage nobody seems to have a clear idea of exactly how, where and when.
I’m not suggesting that it will lead to the death of WS-*, too many large organizations have invested too much in WS-* for it to go away any time soon.

It is also interesting that nobody has yet mentioned how early WOA adapters will end up with a JBOWS architecture instead of a WOA, as has happened to some early SOA adapters. WOA doesn’t seem to offer anything to help alleviate this tendancy – if anything it may well suffer from it even more.
They also need to figure out how WOA will fit into developers and IT departments hands – they won’t get far without better development and management tooling.

Don Box wrote a while back asking for suggestions on how to split a hypothetical $100 budget to best improve the Microsoft HTTP/XML/REST platform. That Don hasn’t yet provided his own solution to the problem suggest that a) it isn’t as easy as he thought or b) MS don’t want to give too much advice away to their competitors Either way, there’s an opportunity for some clever Eclipse folks to get their thinking caps on and produce a WOA tools platform, maybe targetting the huge LAMP server platform.

My guess is, in the time honoured tradition of software engineering, someone will produce a new “architecture” layer that sits on top of both SOA and WOA, and over a long period or time one of the architectures will capture the magical point-of-no-return mindshare. Maybe the SaaS (Software as a Service) banner will evolve into that role?

aehso eclipse, soa, software

Oh, this is très cool. Tom Coates writes that the BBC Programme Catalogue prototype is live. So far it is just a catalog, there’s no media content (yet!). Quick searches: Match of the Day , Matt Lucas, start digging, and you’ll see how rich the catalog data is…

Talk about opening up! How long will it take for other broadcasters (or content producers) just have to open up their content catalogues to survive?

aehso tv

My blog seems to have made it onto a spambot list so it’s time to install a captcha on the comments page I think.

Anyone out there with quick recommendations for any of the various Wordpress captcha/spam tool plugins?

aehso blogging, spam

All this talk of Oracle acquiring JBoss (or even Red Hat) and IBM acquiring Novell/SuSe. Why isn’t anybody talking about the possibility of IBM acquiring Red Hat? Ignoring RHAT’s market cap of >$5.4Bn (affordable to IBM) it would instantly solve IBM’s problems and set them up for years to come – for the first time in 20 years, they would own their preferred OS distribution (It is worth remembering that IBM are probably the biggest contributers to the Linux/Apache/Eclipse-type OSS communities that exist out there – they do get OSS.)
IBM would also be buying control of the JBoss product lines and I’d imagine their Websphere group would relish that.
Either way, NOVL stock looks a tasty bet. Someone is going to end up buying them up, one way or another…

aehso oss, software

BLD BLOG’s excellent A Shoppers Guide to Urban Catastrophe is an entertaining read containing links to vital resources such as a book titled “Catastrophic Cooking: Eating right when all is wrong and the Armageddon Survuval-Kit (hint: the vendor only accepts cash to avoid the “Mark of the Beast”).

For the paranoid, I’m sure there are some useful tips in there somewhere…

aehso eco

My little Mac Mini has already illustrated this to me – these Intel Core Duo CPUs really give great bang for buck, without melting the enclosure. Admittidly, my Mini is only running at 1.66Ghz (compared to the 2.16Ghz chip tested here) but the video encoding performance alone mean it is the right chip for the heart of my PVR (hehe).
The other good news is that the Mac Mini uses Intel’s standard Socket 479 for mounting the CPU. So when these 2.5Ghz+ Core Duo chips are cheap as nuts an upgrade will be in order. That might be timely (and necessary) if Leopard does support virtualization…

aehso mac

Mike Milinkovich and Gunnar Wagenknecht picked up on my earlier post about Eclipse.org project disarray. It’s great to see the issue being discussed openly so I thought I’d clarify where I’m coming from (before someone jumps on me from a height).

On the topic of inter-project interactions, to me there are four main types of interaction

• pushing functionality down (“top down”) proposals
• promoting framework reuse by downstream projects (“bottom up” interaction).
• peer project driven cooperation (usually via refactoring to a common upstream project) as Doug describes.
• project “splitting” interactions, where a project splits to decouple unrelated components.

The comments on Mike’s blog have good examples of each and I suspect there are many, many more that might potentially make sense but have never even been broached publicly. I’ve witnessed obvious integration points being missed possibly out of ignorance – these top level projects are big, it’s hard to know them all inside out So, lots of interaction types.

To the external observer, the process for these interactions is to wait for one conscientious party to instigate ad-hoc discussions, perhaps on a PMC and/or a committer level (often facilitated by Bugzilla). We all know approach does work well for micro issues, years of practice in the OSS community proves that. It sometimes even works well for macro level issues where the parties know each other well and have a shared interest in cooperating.

But Eclipse.org is fostering frameworks that not only build on a common base platform (and sometimes shared sub-frameworks), it is publishing multi-tiered frameworks that commonly have interdependencies on each other. This is a more complex problem space to manage than, say, Apache Commons, or even Apache HTTPD. (That said, I do agree with John A’s comment that perhaps platform can be broken up a bit more – splitting Equinox was great, treating RCP as a separate top level project (away from IDE) might also make sense).

Macro level integration issues like proposing change of ownership of extensions or evaluating the risk of introducing dependencies on extensions developed elsewhere are sometimes contentious and they do not always progress via the above process. Sometimes they don’t progress at all and that in itself isn’t necessarily a problem, until the project hits 1.0. Then it has an API set to maintain that doesn’t fit with other Eclipse.org frameworks. The requirement to support 1.0 APIs is where the problem really starts hits home – before then projects are in their “honeymoon period” and I’m not sure the cost is fully evaluated by the younger projects. I think this is perhaps where the foundation (and Planning/Architecture Councils?) can perhaps facilitate a little more. Not necessarily driving or forcing these types of interactions, but mediating them, from the “bigger picture” perspective.

This point should be taken in the context of the recent explosion in growth of Eclipse.org, both in terms of new members and top level projects. It is a growing pain that the foundation needs to look at. As I mention above, the problem space that Eclipse.org is trying to govern is a little more complex than that of most OSS communities. Perhaps projects need to be monitored just a little in order to end up with a truely consistent framework.

aehso eclipse, osgi, process

Joel Spolsky has produced yet another excellent essay, this time on Development Abstraction. The analogy between software developers cutting code and artists recording songs is a compelling one and I think it clearly illustrates what is missing in most software development organizations:

Nobody expects Dolly Parton to know how to plug in a microphone. There’s an incredible infrastructure of managers, musicians, recording technicians, record companies, roadies, hairdressers, and publicists behind her who exist to create the abstraction that when she sings, that’s all it takes for millions of people to hear her song. All the support staff and management that make Dolly Parton possible can do their jobs best by providing the most perfect abstraction: the most perfect illusion that Dolly sings for us. It is her song.

When you’re listening to her on your iPod, there’s a huge infrastructure that makes that possible, but the very best thing that infrastructure can do is disappear completely. Provide a leakproof abstraction that Dolly Parton is singing, privately, to us.

Without the invisible infrastructure the artist won’t succeed and I fully agree that the same applies in a development group. There is no point in having an orchestra and a conductor if they have instruments that don’t work and recitals are performed on the side of the road.

From a team process point of view these views dovetail nicely with the emerging development processes like Scrum. We recently adapted Scrum in Cape Clear (with a little help from exoftware) and the new process, with a little role changing, already seems to be having a major impact on development organization productivity.

(Spolsky is definately on a run with his use of prominent female figures in his analogies – his keynote presentation at EclipseCon 2006 a few weeks back was attention grabbing, hilarious and food for thought…)

aehso process, software

Apple are facilitating booting XP on a Mac via Boot Camp.

<jaw hits ground>

Unfortunately dual booting sucks. I’ve tried this many a time with various smells of Windows and Linux and found that I inevitably ended up spending most of my time in one of the OS’es – rebooting to complete a task is too much hassle in all but the most critical use cases. Over time, the OS that is run the least tends to get neglected, kind of like to a summer house garden.

Virtualization on the other hand. If they get OS X and Windows running side by side, now that would be something else. The Core Duo CPU in my new Mac Mini includes support for VT, I wonder if the rest of the hardware is compatible. Maybe in a year or so, with the release of Leopard, OS X will support this. I’d better start saving for a massive memory upgrade in the meantime…

[Update: A great quote from the associated /. discussion]

This will change the face of Apple computers.

Yeah, it’s the virtual ugly stick!

aehso mac

Here’s a question for those of you “in the know” in the Irish mobile industry:

Vodafone.co.uk sell the SonyEricsson w810i handset and it can be had for as little as FREE or as much as £100, depending on which plan you sign up for. For example, it costs a £60 if you sign up for a £30 per month plan summarised as “Evening and Weekend 1000 + 250 texts + 3 months 1/2 price line rental + 18 months (contract)”

Vodafone.ie don’t even sell the w810i (how crap is their online store by the way, 3 phones!) so I’ll use the predecessor, the w800i. They don’t even offer the w800i to personal customers. Businesses (SME) get quoted €249 assuming it’s a first time connection or a qualified upgrade.

So, what gives? Why do I have to pay more for the handset and pay more for my monthly “package”? I thought Irish mobile phone customers generated more calls than any of our European counterparts (if anyone has a relevant link please do pass one on, it’d be useful in correspondence with Vodafone).

I guess the other question is what are ComReg doing?

aehso irish, mobile