Tempus Fugit

For some reason. I just counted the number of itworld article I have written. I have written 3 that have not yet been published and 121 that have = 124. Lets see, call it two pages per ariticle on average say...thats...almost a complete booksworth of stuff. Tempus Fugit.

The rise and rise of BitTorrent

[via Kevin Altis]. 1.5 million downloads a month. Yikes.

Mixing document-think and object-think

Collaxa commenting on (one of) the shortcomings of BPELJ

The essence of BPEL (and its power) is that data is modeled as document and messages and XML Schema provides metadata about the structure of those documents. This unification is very powerful because it allows for better tooling. Introduction of serializable Java object into the BPEL type system is a big step backward as it allows people to mix and match documents with object and does not constraint developers to clearly separate orchestration logic and other type of business logic.

Amen to that.

Programming ain't pictures - yet

Eric Newcomer has trouble seeing that the future of software is pictures. Me too. Sometimes, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Visual programming is largely pointless as long as the predominant programming paradigm remains imperative logic. Now, switch to a data flow oriented, SOA world and visual programming makes a lot more sense in my opinion.
Picture logistics infrastructures. Picture aviation hubs. Picture model railways. Now imagine business folk constructing visual models of how their data flows through messaging pipes and hubs and flows through data transforming "services"....

See ? :-)

Once we switch paradigm from algorithm-centric (programmer friendly) to data-centric (business friendly), we can start to talk the same language and - irony of ironies - this type of "talking" is much easier to visualize.

Do we need a Jython JSR?

Kevin Altis doesn't think so.

Class diagrams are not the right metaphor (for services)

A big +1 for this quote from Eric Newcomer (via Savas Parastatidis

(And no, I don't think either UML or MDA is very well suited to using for Web services, either. Class diagrams are just not the right metaphor, since Web services are not object-oriented, and the interaction diagrams aren't rich enough.

Amen.

Perl, XML and crowd dispersing flatulence

Today I found out (via Nova Spivak) about the home page of Erik Ray. I don't know Erik but know the name from the perl/XML book he co-wrote.
His bio is a work of grin-inducing oddness. You will find "flatulence" listed under superpowers. Also note the no-nonsense approach to blogging tools.

Closures and Continuations - the biggest thing since "if"

I have a feeling that the full power of ye olde closures/continuations for simplifying complex, stateless applications is emerging into the daylight. It might also be a fork in the road in the onward evolution of Java. The question naturally arises, fit closures/continuations into Java the language or use languages like groovy, scheme, python, ruby that provide the (with varying levels of completeness.).
Is it my imagination or did Clipper have a form of lexical closures?

Data corruption and data correction in an XML world

Data corruption and data correction in an XML world is an ITWorld article I wrote on the whole concept of "corrupt" data and the psychological effects of textual notations such as XML.

Duck Typing and Duct Tape

Useful piece entitled How to argue about typing by Bruce Eckel. In it, he says that the phrase "Duck Typing" evolved from "Duct Tape". I thought it came from "if it walks like a duck...". Can anyone shed light?