Consistency. I’m not a fan of consensus-driven specs, they sound great in principle but end up being worse than mediocre. Better yet to have point person responsible for the spec, and a few to choose from. James Bennett on why BDFL is the best strategy for evolving HTML:
And the same is true in many other successful open-source projects: Perl, Python and Ruby, for example, all have open development processes, but ultimately remain in the control of a single “BDFL” and/or a few “lieutenants”. And the success of these projects across a broad spectrum of their target markets shows that this process can work extremely well: a general patten of open input and discussion, with a few experienced and trustworthy folks who steer the process and have the power to make final decisions when things would otherwise get bogged down, manages to avoid the downsides of both of the extremes of the false dilemma outlined above.
Integrity. Adam Gomaa has a quick reminder that frameworks exist for conceptual integrity:
When there is no conceptual integrity, a product is unusable as the basis of further programming, and a product with no conceptual integrity is fundamentally incomparable to one that does.
Both links, via Simon Willison.
Isolation. Paul Fremantle of WSO2 is reclaiming the ESB:
Fundamentally, the difference is that the conversion from internal formats and models to the common uniform model happens in the center – in the “ESB” – and is not owned by the application owners. This is actually an Anti-SOA pattern. The single most important aspect of SOA is ownership. The point of a service provider – in real life as well as IT – is that they take full ownership of the problem domain.
Buzzword compliance mandates use of the CIO Approved(™) TLA, even though Paul’s ESB is more of the distributed network of services architecture, rather than the anti-pattern J2J integration stance taken by most other vendors. Quite unfortunate buyers can’t tell them apart.
Testing. RSpec 1.1 is out. Nested contexts and a better syntax for shared behaviors, which I’ve been hoping for since before 1.0. And a few minor bugs that annoyed the hell out of me are nicely fixed. Yay!
Very interesting, but I don’t agree with you. Chris Cameron, still on the case to find out the true identity of Idetrorce. Not need to panic (yet), but don’t say I didn’t warn you:
How safe are you from Idetrorce? Do you really want to know?
Above, anyone knows what this is? (via ffffound)
Chris C
