Remembrance of Things Past. Hal Fulton remembers why Rails was such a success:
I maintain there is much to learn from the Rails phenomenon. Don’t repeat yourself; don’t put a burden on users; don’t design by committee (but do open-source when you release). Be passionate in your work and creative in your marketing. If you apply these principles to your projects, they will at least go more smoothly.
The interesting thing about this quote is not what it says, but where it shows up. A 4-page (16 ad units) article on CIO magazine. And this time it’s not the hypothetical “magazine for people who PowerPoint” that I use rhetorically, but the real free subscription one.
I buy therefore I am. From a presentation by Bret Sutter (via Ed Gibbs)
“We just bought a registry, we spent a lot of money.†I said, “Great how many services are you gonna put in that registry?†“Well we have three or four. And my point with those folks is, “You could keep up with that in an email or a wiki page. Why do you need a registry for three or four services.”
I think we should be seeing other people. I said it before, and I’ll say it again. Most of the complexity that is Java 2 Enterprisy Edition is fear of commitment exuberated by the shallow vendor dating pool. Cote over at RedMonk has the details:
Ultimately, Java is a culture that emphasizes knowing less rather than more. Anything you know and act on in your application is a dependency that can cost you time and money in the future. Better, the thinking goes, to deliver less and be able to sustain it over the long-haul than to deliver more and run out of code energy in long run.
Going green. Things I love about XML: a) that which it does very well, b) that which it did well before we knew any better, c) lessons learned from pushing the envelope. Now it’s time to start thinking green, save some trees and cut down on pollution.
IT Conservative on 10 years of global warming:
People talk about global warming and energy waste. They should calculate how much of that can be blamed on XML. I think people would be surprised. Hundreds of thousands of servers are at this very moment wasting their CPU cycles and bandwidth, and with that their energy, on parsing and generating XML documents. Haven’t we ruined enough with this already. Isn’t it time to come up with more efficient data representation format?
Injectionless. Big thanks to Jamis Buck for taking the time to rewrite Net::SSH/SFTP and get rid of the complexity injection:
I cringe whenever I remember those days, three years ago, when I was in the middle of a big Java project at BYU and was learning the ins-and-outs of dependency injection. For Java (and similarly constrained languages), DI is a technique that allows you to write modular code without tightly coupling the components. It seemed like a neat idea. So why do I cringe now?
Because I tried to bring that idea to Ruby, in the form of (first) Copland, and (later) Needle.
I have a bunch of that “looked good, back than” code lying around, so I feel the shame. Hopefully I would also get the time to sweep it under the 2.0 rug.
James Governor
vednis
Assaf
People Over Process » SOA and the Simple-heads