afongen

Checky 2.0 has been released.

And hey, it’s been ported to IE: CheckIE.

Errant Architectures, in which Martin Fowler explores some of the problems with distributed architectures: namely, there’s a huge overhead to distributed objects. One solution he discusses is the Remote Façade, in which course-grained objects are used at the distribution boundaries to provide an interface to finer-grained objects. The benefit is that you can reduce network traffic overhead by making as few remote method invocations as possible. His preferred solution, though, is not to distribute objects in the first place.

By happenstance, I read this article a couple days before coming across the Remote Façade (aka Session Façade) in Rod Johnson’s wonderful Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. He derides the idea as not so much a design pattern as a workaround to problems introduced by distributed architecture. I really like the tone and practical stance taken in this book. I’m learning much even though I don’t do anything with J2EE. Yet.

In a sidebar to his article, Fowler writes:

In this discussion, I’ve assumed a synchronous, RPC-based interface. However, although that’s what I’ve described, I actually don’t think it’s always the best way of handling a distributed system. Increasingly, my preference is for a message-based approach that’s inherently asynchronous. In particular, I think they’re the best use of Web services, even though most of the examples published so far are synchronous.

He then points us to Enterprise Integration Patterns. Good stuff. Lots to take in. In particular, I’m suddenly very intrigued by asynchronous messaging. Quite different from how I usually think about things, although at first glance it seems that I may have already given it some thought through my dealings with Jabber.

So much to learn. So much fun to be had.

You may recall that the Open Source Application Foundation recently received a $98,000 grant to help extend Chandler (their first product, a personal information manager) to meet the needs of higher education. They’ve now released a report that outlines their plans: Chandler in Higher Education – “Westwood”. Westwood will build on the first full, stable release of Chandler.

After working closely with representatives from a number of universities we concluded there were four key recommendations for incremental functionality in Westwood:

1. Nomadic usage and central Repositories
2. Standards based Calendar Access Protocol (CAP) Client
3. Full interoperability with standards based infrastructure
4. Robust security framework

The full report is actually fairly interesting.

Microsoft stuff that’s caught my attention and that’s cluttering my bookmarks:

• Free e-book about securing IIS. In case that link goes away, here’s a direct link to the book (zipped archive of text files).
• Rewrite.NET — A URL Rewriting Engine for .NET.
• Is Internet Explorer Dead? There’s discussion/speculation elsewhere, but this is the most interesting bit.

One more for my reading list this summer: Perl 6 Essentials.

The Selfish Class.

This paper takes a code’s-eye view of software reuse and evolution. A code-level artifact must be able to attract programmers in order to survive and flourish. The paper addresses the question of what an object might do to encourage programmers to (re-)use it, as opposed to using some other object, or building new ones.

Whether despite or because of the code’s-eye view, in the end these are worthwhile thoughts about writing re-usable software components.

Disney will start selling DVDs that self-destruct. Exposure to oxygen will render the DVDs unplayable after 48 hours.

I betcha they wish they’d done that when video tapes first appeared.

I wonder how these will play out in the marketplace. This scheme alone won’t prevent duplication, of course, but I don’t believe that was ever Disney’s primary concern (they’re worried about controlling how and when we view what they consider their property). The DVDs are being sold as “rentals,” so consumers won’t expect long-term access. Never mind that 48 hours is not long enough. If the DVDs are cheap enough, people might not honestly care about the time limit — unless the DVDs don’t play at all, which is bound to be the case on some “unapproved” hardware like computers (viz. Macs, as we saw with copy-protected CDs).

Unfortunately, I don’t expect this to completely backfire on Disney. If public reaction is poor, they can either quietly retire the idea or continue to put such a spin on it that it’s eventually accepted. I mean, the RIAA and MPAA have successfully done this with filesharing, haven’t they?

Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. I might actually buy this.

Annraí O’Toole: The Problem with J2EE. “…while J2EE is great, it isn’t the answer to every problem, specifically it is overkill as an infrastructure to deploy Web Services.”

Jon Udell: Appropriate use of J2EE/EJB.

Not that this has anything to do with web services, but… A few weeks back I heard some rumbling about requiring that any CMS we use be J2EE compliant. This pissed me off for a couple days.

1. This criterion was being added by people who neither understand Java development nor are involved with any of the systems on which our web sites are deployed.
2. We’re not a Java shop.
3. There’s not a helluva lot of J2EE in the open source CMS world, obviously not in those written in languages other than Java. I’ll resist any effort to needlessly exclude open source solutions at the outset.
4. Requiring J2EE is a vendor-driven idea. It seemed pretty clear that this was being suggested to play nicely with Oracle, who have a portal to sell us. Call me crazy, but I’m a sucker for choosing software that meets an organization’s needs rather than a vendor’s.
5. Isn’t J2EE just a wee bit overkill?

Eventually I calmed down. We’ll need some sort of interoperability, I reasoned, and as long as it’s not set in stone as a requirement, J2EE might be useful. Too, it turns out that it’s just a suggestion. But still. It should not surprise me, but it sure as hell bothers me, the way these ideas are just tossed around as if they’re givens.

Blast it, I missed yet another TCPHP meeting on Wednesday. Looks like it was a good one, too. I’m just going to have to give up deluding myself that I’ll ever make it to one.

On the other side, that night I got to see The Matrix. That makes up for it, I suppose.

And then last night I got to spend a few hours with Owen walking along the Mississippi River. He’s started to be ticklish, which is just so much fun. There is no sweeter sound to my ears than my son’s laughter. He got tired after a while and dozed off on my shoulder as we walked, but occasionally would raise his head to stare wide-eyed at the trees. He is so damn adorable it breaks my heart.

Later that evening, I surprised myself by remembering to watch the lunar eclipse. Can’t remember the last time I saw an eclipse.

It’s strange, though. Normally when I look at the moon, I get a vivid sense of being a very small part of a very large planet, which is itself a tiny speck in the universe. This is at once humbling and enthralling. It’s the only time I ever even come close to imagining how truly vast and miraculous the universe is. I would have expected the eclipse to be even more awe-inspiring, but instead my reaction was very cold and analytical. “Oh look, the earth is casting a shadow on the moon, isn’t that unusual. Er, pretty.” I didn’t feel it in any way. Bit of a let-down, that.

Now I have a sudden urge to reread The Soul of the Night.