Inevitable Technology Illussions

In this business, you can be wrong in one of two ways. (a) you can be wrong and outvoted by a majority who are right. (b) you can be right but outvoted by a majority who have fallen for a fallacy.
Inevitable Technology Illusions is an ITWorld article on this subject.

Inappropriate Abstractions

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not a big fan of object abstractions for distributed systems. Part of my mission at the moment is to promote a vision of loosely coupled systems that gets most of its power from starting with asynchronous XML messaging as its primary abstraction.
Its hard work. There is a lot of wishful thinking out there that just hopes against hope that XML/Web Services is the magic sauce that will make distributed objects work. It won't. This interview with Anders Hejlsberg of C# (and Turbo Pascal and Delphi) fame contains some gems.

"The problem with that type of programming [OO] is: it works great in a single process; it works quite well across processes; it works fairly well in a small intranet; but then it completely sucks thereafter."

"If you hide the fact that messages go across a network, and don't know when they go across, you end up with chatty conversations. And all of a sudden, the speed of light can become a big problem for you."

"...Whereas, we know precious little about how to scale CORBA systems in a geo-scalable fashion. We just don't. There's just no knowledge about it, and I've never heard of anyone being particularly successful doing it."

So you think you know how to program a Web App do ya?

Check this out for a mind bender from Christian Tismer. Methinks continuations may make a comeback. Not only are they excellent for web programming (as Christian's example shows) but they are great for event driven architectures such as (as far as I'm concerned) any SOA worthy of the name.

Bloglines supporting Atom

The excellent bloglines server side aggregator now supports Atom.

Binary file formats get the Eric Raymond treatment

"When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes"

The Importance of Being Textual
Priceless. Way to go Eric.

Turned off introductory programming in College by Java or C++ or Pascal? Try this textbook.

Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science.
Python is a wonderful teaching language. If the sound of "public static void" or "char far star" makes you hurl your breakfast, try Python whose equivalent (in both cases) is "".

ISO standard status for Relax NG

ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003
Information technology -- Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) --
Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation -- RELAX NG
Catalog entry.
Congratulations to all involved in this excellent technology, especially James Clark and Murata Makoto. Fantastic stuff.