Need for Speed

Bosworth On Why AJAX Failed, Then Succeeded links to which isn't the first time he has examined AJAX's success and failures or why other technologies fail such as RDF. Some commentary was interesting in the comments and a few blogs, including this summary:

All in all the speaker (intentionally) kept his talk simple and stupid but here are some points I think are worth noting:

• Products fail because of [lack of] human psychology not poor engineering
• Top 3 keypoints of UI:
1. Speed
2. Speed
3. Speed
• Your app should be a tool, it shouldn't leave the user feeling like one
• Search isn't perfect but it is far better than any human can do so it is tolerable.
• Analyze the frequency of use of feature and implement those first
• If your app takes more than 2 seconds to load - forget about it
• The Motorola RAZR was cool enough so the poor UI (narrow keypad) didnt matter

Intelligent Design comes to Australia

Intelligent Design "Scientists across the country are outraged.

So what's all the fuss about Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design or ID, is being put forward as a serious scientific theory. It's even found it's way into some high schools."

They made mention of The Wedge Document which outlines a way to conquer the world. Apparently you need more than a death ray these days.

Maybe some Gerin Oil "dry-out" clinics need to be created. Adam Bosworth recently decloaked an article related to it too.

Evolution not creation

Another speech by Adam Bosworth He talked mostly on a TDD/Agile theme where applications are developed in 2 week iterations based directly on customer usage. This offers a better alternative to software architects spending years in seclusion developing the be-all and end-all API and developers hoping that they will get what they need. He cited Windows as an example of this approach. Unsurpisingly, this leads to more tightly coupled code as reported in the recent article about Microsoft rewriting Windows by the Wall Street Journal.

Bosworth calls this approach intelligent reaction rather than intelligent design. Google, eBay and Salesforce were given as examples of this application driven rather than API driven development.

Relating this back to RDF and agile databases, the experience at Salesforce is that the most significant amount of effort is spent customising the data not in other areas such as the user-interface or processing logic. While he doesn't give a reason for data over processing he does say that customised user interfaces are too expensive because they require more user training.

A transcript of some of the talk is available at: Bosworth: The new model is, 'run like mad'.

Supping from the Information Firehose

* Oracle 10g Support for RDF "There are procedures provided to search the RDF models with a language that looks like a bit like SPARQL...The search is pretty nice because you can join your search on standard SQL tables, thus combining both your triple model and relational models together.

Oracle also has Rule support, in the form of Rule Indexes. A builtin set of rules for RDF Schema (RDFS) semantics is provided, which is a very nice touch. You are also free to create your own rules, both with the query pattern matching and filters."
* An Atom Store With links to people wanting to create a non-SQL store for Atom, including the very good Bosworth's Web of Data (original here) which is largely about why new databases should not be like Oracle but should distribute the processing (no views, triggers, etc).
* RDFAuthor does SPARQL "Damian is working on a new version of RDFAuthor that generates SPARQL queries (instead of the older Squish notation). It can also (not sure which protocol(s)) get results from a query service." I liked the original RDFAuthor - good to see an update is underway.
* Wrapping rdflib's Graph around a 4RDF Model "I wrote a 4Suite RDF model backend for rdflib, that allows the wrapping of Graph around a live 4Suite RDF model. Finally, I used this backend to execute a sparql-p query..."
* Secrets of lightweight development success, Part 7: Java alternatives Closures, Continuations, Metaprogramming and Reflection: "In short, the Java language just isn't a very productive applications language. The founders made some wise compromises to wrestle control away from C++, but we're starting to pay for those compromises."
* ONJava 2005 Reader Survey Results, Part 1 "Eclipse (76 percent), NetBeans (21 percent), None (17 percent), IntelliJ (13 percent)...JBoss (38 percent), None (28 percent), WebSphere (21 percent), WebLogic (20 percent)"
* Language Innovation: C# 3.0 explained "...most of the features of C# 3.0 are, arguably, nothing but syntactic sugar designed to make programming more productive..." One of the things that was (originally) good about Java was the lack of syntax (I thought anyway!).
* KVM over IP

Anti-metadata Google

Dear Mr. Bosworth "I can't believe that a smart guy like you could advocate Poscasting as a solution to the complexity of the semantic web and all that enterprise, corporate complexity - without a hint of meta-data - anywhere.

How's the work? Inference? Osmosis?

I know that Google is known as an anti-meta-data sort of place - but PLEASE oH LORd - get over that!

This is NOT about the religious wars of RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0. I couldn't give a dam about rdf, T B-L or any of that semantic web hooey.

I'd just like to see folks standardize on attributes, properties and meta-data around these new, burgeoning forms of micro-content."

Your blog is boring and other links

* RSS, Blogs on a Roll, But How Extensive is Their Use? and a response.
* Swebok All you need to know about Software Engineering.
* Best Software Essays of 2004 via Danny.
* ISCOC04 Talk on how RSS 1.0 failed, with lots of other comments that seem to support a RESTful like system like RDF. With followups Fielding Bosworth and Quick Reactions.
* The Many Faces of J2EE, v5.0 Another annotations for J2EE 1.5 piece as well as Google and JBoss join SE/EE Java Council.
* Domain Speific Language and Domain Specific Modelling. Is UML really the best tool for the job?. The end of UML?