Come the glorious impersonal computer revolution

Sitting, waiting for a delayed flight to Dublin out of Jacksonville, Florida yesterday I was struck - as I always am - by the number of phone kiosks - all empty - littered all over the place.

These kiosks serve more as post-modern art installations than as useful devices these days thanks to the ubiquity of cellphones.

What to do with them? I have a suggestion : lets start The Impersonal Computer Revolution.

Balancing security, risk and freedom

The CIO summit is over. Some interesting presentations and lots of very interesting people with lots of very interesting integration problems.

Looking back on it, I think my favourite presentation was Jeffrey Rosen from George Washington University Law School who talked about ways in which security measures can be implemented without overly impacting privacy/freedom if they are approached carefully.

His book The Naked Crowd is well worth checking out if you are interested in this stuff.

Kicking back on Amelia Island

I'm posting this in the Marche Burette Deli on Amelia Island, Florida. I'm here getting ready for the FCW Government CIO Summit start starts tommorrow.

I will be talking about the Public Services Broker - an eGovernment SOA I have been working on for the last two years with the Irish Government. (Geeks go here. I travelled sans portable this time so postings will be patchy for a few days.

Method invocation order for multiple inheritance junkies

Michele Simionato explains the C3 algorithm for Method Resolution Order as used in Python 2.3.

Those not interested in same might like to take a look simply to marvel at the ASCII art.

Method invocation order for multiple inheritance junkies

Michele Simionato explains the C3 algorithm for Method Resolution Order as used in Python 2.3.

Those not interested in same might like to take a look simply to marvel at the ASCII art.

Method invocation order for multiple inheritance junkies

Michele Simionato explains the C3 algorithm for Method Resolution Order as used in Python 2.3.

Those not interested in same might like to take a look simply to marvel at the ASCII art.

Message exchange, stateless services and Domain Specific Languages in Service Oriented Computing

Via Radovan Janecek comes this interesting 3 page PDF Microsoft's Next Frontier.

Loose coupling via stateless, message oriented interactions. Yummy. Domain Specific Languages. Doubly yummy.

As I see it, C# and Java are today's assemblers. Speed of application delivery trumps speed of application execution 99 times out of 100 (welcome to capitalism). Then there is Moore's law. Add them together and I think its likely that the action will move to DSLs (Domain Specific languages0 that target the VMs for those two runtimes).

DSLs that allow developers to work naturally with documents as first class "objects" (for want of a better word) are required. In years to come, I hope we all collectively cringe at todays crop of Event/Pull/Tree/Marshalling abstractions for XML processing. LAML, xduce and HaXML offer tantalising glimpes of where we might be headed. (I predict lots of GUIs fronting these things).

DSLs that allow "event driven" business process description. PI-Calculus is on everyones lips but don't forget Petri-nets or even plain old Finite State Machines.

DSLs that embrace the dynamic typing implicit in moving "type checking" away from objects/records and into document types (grammers). (Jython for dynamic typing, maybe something like Haskell's polymorphic types with some sort of native type for Tree Automata ) for those who want compile time document type validation.

DSLs that cross-translate to XML (XNFs = XML Normal Form:-) but provide human-oriented grokkable syntaxes. RelaxNG Compact Syntax leads the way but I predict the XUL's/XAML's of this world will follow suit.