As seen on TV. Steve Vinoski on the similarities between ESB and the bargain multi-tools they sell you on late-night TV:
Frankly, if I were an enterprise architect today, and I were genuinely concerned about development costs, agility, and extensibility, I’d be looking to solve everything I possibly could with dynamic languages and REST, and specifically the HTTP variety of REST. I’d avoid ESBs and the typical enterprise middleware frameworks unless I had a problem that really required them (see below). I’d also try to totally avoid SOAP and WS-*.
Speaking of marketing. This is one brilliant product. It’s all natural, hypoallergenic and fragance-free. Dermatologically tested. It protects sensitive skin from dryness. No side effects. Which is reason enough to call it the Expert Sensitive Refreshing Facial Spritz. Ingredients: water. At £3.99 for a single bottle, it works out to £32.92 a liter.
The juxtaposition of ESB and a £3.99 water-spray bottle, not by accident.
Humanized. Long read, but worth taking a break from coding and going through this post, especially if you’re involved in open source and think that people matter more than code:
The difference between the Mozilla and Firefox was that Mozilla was the result of developers contributing every web-browser feature they could think of. It only started to become humane once the Firefox team applied a unifying principle — “Does this help Mom surf the web?” — and pared away features that didn’t fit. It’s not enough to duplicate what has come before; even in an established category, a product still needs a unifying design, based on a clear vision of what users need to accomplish.
Yes, yes and yes. Brian ‘Bex’ Huff, on the day repeating reads no longer return the same result:
The same may hold true for databases… for sufficiently complex systems, a database only represents a vague approximation of the state of your organization. This problem will only get worse when people implement SOA across the enterprise… which will enable complex interactions and dependencies across business units that were never before possible… Empowering? Yes. Important? Yes. Scary? Yes.
Via Santiago Gala:
I think the metaphor illustrates best that we need to drop the pretense of having a consistent, precise representation of the world and settle for abstractions that are fuzzier but more expressive.
It wasn’t there to begin with. Curtis Poe doesn’t think MySQL and PostgreSQL are all that relational:
In the relational model, instead of tables, you have relations. There are a number of differences, but the key one here is that a relation does not allow duplicate tuples (analogous to “rows”). In SQL, you can also create views. Views sort of look like tables, but depending on the implementation, you have various limitations to how you can update, insert, and delete with them.