Thursday, January 03, 2008

Morning Coffee 134

• Bill de Hora responds to a few of my Durable and RESTful ideas. He points out that relying on a client-generated ID can be troublesome, and recommends using multiple identifiers - one created by the sender, one by the receiver and one representing the message exchange itself. However, the sender ID is vulnerable to client bugs & tampering as Bill points out, and neither the receiver ID nor the exchange ID can be used to determine if a given message is a duplicate. If you don't trust the sender, is it even possible to determine if a given message is a duplicate?
• Pablo Castro confirms that there are "practical limits" to what ADO.NET Data Services can do with respect to idempotence. Nothing in his post was surprising, though I hope it will be more explicitly called out in the final docs. Developers used to the comforting protection of a transaction may be in for a rude awakening.
• Dare Obasanjo has a great post comparing the new features in C# 3.0 to dynamic languages like IronPython. I believe many of the productivity aspects of dynamic languages have little to do with being dynamic.
• Pat Helland noodles on durability and messaging, two topics near and dear to my heart (probably from working with him for a couple of years). I'm not sure where he's going with this - his conclusion that "Basically, big, complex, and distributed system are big, complex, and distributed" isn't exactly ground-breaking. But his point that "durable" isn't a binary concept is worth more consideration. Also, his description of IMS only looking at the effects of a committed transaction is very similar to how web sites work, though obviously HTTP isn't durable so you can't make event horizon optimizations like IMS did.
• Tangentially related, Werner Vogels discusses the idea of eventually consistent distributed databases. Today, that's a problem mostly only Internet-scale sites like Amazon deal with. In the near future of continued data explosion + manycore, we'll all have to deal with it.
• Nick Malik argues that categorizing enterprise applications by lifecycle is much less useful than categorization based on organizational impact. He might also need a new chair.
• Jesus Rodriguez digs into one of SSB's new features in SQL 2008: conversation priorities.
• Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz and Sam Gentile are mixing it up over the definition of SOA. Sam thinks SOA has to include business drivers and Arnon doesn't. I'm with Sam on this, defining "SOA" independently from "Applying SOA" seems pointless. Then again, rigorously defining SOA - much less arguing about said definition - seems like a waste of time in the first place IMHO.
• Wow, this guy Zed is mad at the Ruby community.
• Andrew Baron has 8 Reasons Why The TV Studios Will Die. Personally, I think reason #2 - Expendable Middle-Person - is the most important. If content producers can reach consumers directly, what value-add will the networks provide? (via United Hollywood)