It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
There's yet another new version of MetaKit, and a new version of e4Graph to go with it. For those who may not recall, MetaKit is a lightweight persistent storage engine in C++, with TCL, Python, and Lua bindings. It supports transactions and automatic schema evolution. The resulting files work across any platform that MetaKit runs on. Apple used it for the Mac OS X Address Book application. I've been maintaining a Carbon port that works on any Carbon system but takes advantage of mmap() on Mac OS X. I'm kinda proud of that.
Now I need to roll those patches forward to this new version of MetaKit, and do anything I need to keep e4Graph, a layer on top of MetaKit that handles graph-structured data, Carbonized too. This is excellent stuff that not enough developers are aware of. Quit writing file I/O code and worrying about backward compatibility, endian issues, undo/redo... and just use MetaKit, with or without e4Graph. Your users will thank you.
9:58:16 PM
Keith & Mike both seem happy to subset SOAP and WSDL. Wave bye-bye to the chance that SOAP interop means anything more than interops with MSFT. Where are all the MSFT guys who were up in arms 12-18 months ago about subsets? [Simon Fell]
Hopefully the up-in-arms guys using XML-RPC which is too simple to subset. The SOAP conglomeration of ideas is a perfect avenue for dotNET's myriad definitions of "web services".
Anyone who uses any aspect of dotNET can tell his manager he's using "web services" which is a standard, right?
Can you hear the locks clicking behind you as the door slams shut?
It's rapidly getting to the point where I can't condone the use of SOAP—which, to most people, translates directly to not condoning the use of web services. Well, so be it. Interestingly enough, my CTO at work is unimpressed with web services as well. We had a very constructive conversation about them yesterday, drawing on parallels to CORBA experience in a previous life.
As I've written before, SOAP, WDSL, and UDDI are recapitulating CORBA. SOAP <-> IIOP, WDSL <-> IDL, and UDDI <-> CosNaming/Interface Repository. The only identifiable benefit of SOAP vs. CORBA is that it works over HTTP via port 80, thereby masquerading as web traffic—and that's a pretty damned questionable benefit.
Sorry, but I'm arriving at the conclusion that the correct response to SOAP, XML-RPC, and their ilk is: just say no.
9:09:23 PM
Simon St. Laurent has been writing some interesting stuff in his Advogato diary recently. Worth following for another perspective on various XML debates. [Eclectic]
Simon's diary is indeed excellent, particularly in treating (without seeming to offer a hard-and-fast conclusion) the issues in determining whether or not XML must have a processing model or not, which is how I see the types vs. no-types debate.
Simon also seems quite clear that the Web Services emperor has no clothes, another conclusion that is becoming increasingly clear to me. I started off being agnostic about it and have even written conciliatory passages that got me quoted on Scripting News, among other places. But as the RPC steamroller barrels on, I'm feeling less and less conciliatory. Reading some of the posts to XML-Dev from folks who make quite clear that all they care about is doing what some customer says they want, without any concern for its impact on the public Internet, doesn't really allow me to maintain my neutral stance. If you want tbe bennies of the web, write your web services the way the web works, not the way procedure calls in your favorite language work. End of story.
8:48:18 PM
As a random fact, I installed Python last night. I decided it's finally time to take a look. [Eclectic]
Python strikes me as rapidly turning into the C++ of the scripting world, both in terms of popularity and in terms of questionable growth of a questionable foundation. I just don't understand its popularity. Python may be the language that drives me back to Scheme on an ongoing basis.
8:29:52 PM
'Jaguar' OS X Upgrade Huge Leap Forward for Apple. By jumping on the instant messaging bandwagon and bringing back some older but much-missed
Mac OS functionality, Apple is aiming to shore up both developer and user support for Mac
OS X with its latest release, code-named Jaguar. [osOpinion]
Jaguar so far sounds like a nice, solid incremental upgrade. I'm most intrigued by the planned enhancements to the Mail program, especially the semantic modeling of spam. I hope that Apple actually has some kind of Latent Semantic Analysis API that they're going to offer developers; that'd be sweet!
And of course, if they're as successful advancing Rendezvous as a standard as they have been with FireWire, TrueType, Unicode, etc. then the world of TCP/IP will have been radically altered—for the better.
8:23:42 PM
One of the people I'll miss seeing here in Minneapolis (I hate how little time I'm ending up having here) is Steven Clift, who thinks and writes about democracy. He calls himself a "radical incrementalist." I think geology thinks about itself the same way ÷ at least along the fault lines. I mean that in a positive sense, by the way, and think of myself kinda the same way.
One of the great unfulfilled promises of the Net, I believe, is bringing democracy back to the Commons, where it benefits from clue exchange among people who have stong convictions yet open minds.
One more indication that Doc is, in fact, a Libertarian, by philosophy if not necessarily by party affiliation.
Um, how about a threat on par with the Boston Strangler, since he's hell-bent on throttling an actual innovative industry that's quite a bit larger than his?
8:15:50 PM
What's New in Sex Games? Foreplay. Games involving sex have been around as long as there have been games, but Playskins, the new online role-playing game, demands players engage in foreplay and flirting in order to get the cybersex. By Brad King. [Wired News]
Heh. About time the generally linear format of computer gaming was used to a good end! I wonder what a good non-linear game developer like Warren Spector (Thief, Deus Ex) could do with this?
8:03:18 PM
The Future of Online Entertainment. What will the future of online entertainment look like? Perhaps we can look at the online porn industry for some answers. A well written short article, talking about how online porn is the group that has been blazing the trail. I'm not sure I agree with the prediction of user class stratification but most of what is said seems plausible. [Flutterby!]
I think users will indeed end up participating in class stratification, if only because class stratification is part of human nature.
More generally, it's about time that people realize that the future of computing in general is pretty well predicted by the sex and gaming industries—and it's a bit surprising that the sex and gaming industries haven't gotten together more and earlier.
7:57:47 PM
Usability : The Cranky User: Drowning in Aqua - Mac OS X harder to use than Mac OS9. (SOURCE:dangerousmeta
)-We are paying a big cost for stability! Mac OS X *is* a lot less usable than Mac OS 9. But I wouldn't want to go back to the flakiness and instability of Mac OS 9 (or Windoze 95/98/Me for that matter).The Aqua interface isn't all bad; there are many quirks and features, I'm sure, that have improved. However, Aqua stands today as a tour de force, a grand showing of just how unbelievably awful an interface can be. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
This comes up from time to time, and I'm not sure I understand why. Show me several usability studies that demonstrate that Aqua is less usable than Classic, and maybe I'll be persuaded. But as a single data point, when I go back to Classic from time to time, it now strikes me as noisy, cluttered, and in-my-face, whereas Aqua strikes me as quite a bit cleaner, minimalistic, and task-focused.
7:51:45 PM
Roland nails it again: Dr. Meyer's book is indeed required reading for everyone who wants to grok objects, and perhaps even moreso for those who think they already do.
7:29:18 PM
Modern C++ Design offers several multimethod engines, without requiring a preprocessor. These days, anytime I see C++ stuff done with a preprocessor/precompiler, I start to wonder whether the developer really understands templates or not.
7:23:03 PM
The only book you need to refresh your C++ knowledge: Stroustrup: The C++ Programming Language (Third Edition). I recently helped a friend study for an online C++ test (the same friend who did the OO test, see below for what I think of these online tests!). C++ s*cks! Only people who truly grok OO should be allowed to use C++. Everybody else should use (in no particular order) Eiffel, Java or Smalltalk or Lisp or even Perl, Python or Ruby! But C++ the Programming Language Special edition (or the 3rd edition if you can't afford the special edition) is the book if you want to refresh your knowledge and come up to speed on the latest compilers.
What would I do instead of an online test for interviewing developers and technical team leads? Answer: the JoelOnSoftware/Microsoft interview. Summary Ask the developer write a small C function, ask a question that they can't possibly answer (like how to calculate the volume of water in the Fraser river), standard behavioural questions and look for people who are smart and get things done [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
The problem—or opportunity—is that C++ isn't just object-oriented. It's also imperative, functional, and generic. Learning what constructs to use when is what separates the masters from the neophytes. Unfortunately, because of C++'s C heritage, which it refused to repudiate, neophytes are likely to be bitten by "traps and pitfalls" that you have to have a level of mastery to avoid in the first place!
I would actually recommend Stroustrup's Design and Evolution of C++ for those who find themselves asking "why?" about C++ a lot.
Relative newcomers should seek Accelerated C++, which deals with C++ by treating important concepts first, rather than going feature-by-feature like a dictionary.
