Tuesday, March 19, 2002

My own $0.02 on the issue of multi language development in .NET : GET A LIFE !!! Are you people nuts? Its bad enough to have to put up with the problems of one language, now you want to mix and match neutered versions of others within the same project? What is it with developers that they always have to come up with these hairbrained scheme's of one-upsmanship. And you know whats worse? There are some middle management Dilberts who actually boy into this line of bull and ask their teams to implement it. Whew what a mess!   8:41:21 PM     Just Say .Nyet. Columnist Nicholas Petreley says that most of the features touted in the .Net development environment have been available in Java for some time. [Pythoz.com (weblog.jorgen.larsen.name)] 8:35:19 PM     News.com: "To achieve the long-elusive goal of easily finding information hidden in computer files, Microsoft is returning to a decade-old idea." First they tried to make the file system a database. That didn't work, so now they'll try to make the database a file system. Forgive me while I choke down my scepticism. It's not that I believe it can't be done, it's just that I'm not sure it should be done. Data warehousing projects in general seem more likely to end up as runaways than most other large systems, and this plan sounds like the mother of all warehousing projects. Define a data model that can handle, uhhh, anything. Now make it super-efficient, then move all your data into it. Good luck! The irony is that other parts of Microsoft seem to 'get it', and appear to be headed toward federated systems built from loosely connected autonomous nodes that communicate via message passing, making no assumptions about the underlying data representation at any given node: sort of like deterministic finite automata at Internet scale. This makes much more sense to me than trying to stuff everything into a giant database. Hopefully this is an example of botched reporting in the trade press, and not a direction shift. Time will tell, and I'll be watching anxiously and hoping for an invite to the first SDR on this stuff. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 8:31:14 PM     Agility in Software Development. In this excerpt from his book, Jim Highsmith looks at agility in software development and its success in other fields such as manufacturing; and explores the concept of Agile Software Development Ecosystems. [Pythoz.com (weblog.jorgen.larsen.name)] 8:28:18 PM     No Web services on Java?. "I don't know of anybody who's actually been deploying Web services at all," says James Gosling of Sun Microsystems, in this eWeek article by Peter Coffee. Is this what Sun calls "innovation?" All this proves is that James isn't hanging out in the .NET newsgroups over on news://news.devx.com (there are quite a few developers there and other places working on Web services albeit on the .NET platform. Yeah, I don't know anyone who's doing Web services in Java and maybe to James that's all that matters. Mostly that's cause Sun dragged its feet on SOAP-enabling Java). Sun has been dragging its feet on Web services simply cause Microsoft is out front with them. That was a strategic mistake on Sun's part and one that'll hurt Java for years to come. Oh, the little boys are throwing sand at each other. Yet another example that Sun is rudderless and can't figure out how to compete with Microsoft other than by throwing lawsuits and insults around. I so wish Sun would fire Scott McNealy. This attitude is coming right from him. Sun, it's time to put your own innovations on the table and stop the insults -- tell this industry where you want to take Java. Stop telling us where you don't want to take Java or what's bad about Microsoft's approach (unless you have a better one to offer). Developers are seeing through this shit and you're in danger of losing your developers back to Microsoft because of it. Even in Silicon Valley the .NET user group's membership is swelling and the Java user group's membership is stagnating. That's a huge danger sign of rough sailing ahead for Java. Will they heed the warning signs or continue business as usual? I have a feeling that as long as Scott McNealy is in power at Sun they'll continue with the rudderless lack of innovations. Oh well. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog] [Pythoz.com (weblog.jorgen.larsen.name)] 8:26:26 PM     Patrick Logan comments on my issues re: Microsoft's "stuff everything into a database" strategy, saying: "Agreed. Isn't this what Google does? ...Why wouldn't Microsoft just build us a Google?"  Darn good point! Note how Google doesn't require you move all your data into a common data store - they leave the data right where it already is, and just layer on the searching & caching value. Makes sense to me. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 8:25:11 PM     Dave points out Protocol 7's OPML->SVG converter. Quite apart from being a nice little demo of using XSLT to generate SVG, it pointed me to the SVG-wiki, which is built using Open Wiki. I've been looking for the right wiki engine for a community project I've been tinkering with, and Open Wiki looks to have all the features I want. Cool! It uses ASP, now all I have to do is port it up to ASP.NET. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 8:22:20 PM     LA-Times: German craftsmen revert back to the century old practice of spending several years "on the road".Unfortunately the on-line edition didn't have the cool photos that were published in print. 8:20:55 PM

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