Re: One Thought about what Web 2.0 Means
Re: One Thought about what Web 2.0 Means
- Subject: Re: One Thought about what Web 2.0 Means
- From: Ian Joyner <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:36:04 +1000
So we'll just toss (I almost said 'chuck') out all our hardware
because the Web now runs magically on the ether. I get uneasy when
people use the word 'legacy' because it has become a coded word for
replacing tried-and-true technology that has become reliable over a
long period of time with the latest untried fad.
Web 2.0 from what I can see has just been a marketing term, not
meaning anything much.
Alex is probably right that a successful transition to OOT has not
meant a successful transition to more productive development. One
reason is that a lot of development was transitioned to one of the
worst languages of all time - C++, which just dragged the worst of
the old methods along into obfuscated OO notation, while preserving
all the horrible pitfalls of C. Another reason is that we missed the
sensible middle ground (a position I have learnt is always unpopular,
because both of the extreme sides hate you for being sensible).
On one hand we had really heavy OO development, typified by
development in C++ under the control of consultants using UML,
exacerbating the bad old divisions of labour between analysts and
designers and programmers. On the other had, we had Agile and XP,
where pair programming may be seen as a panacea. Don't get me wrong,
I like a lot of things about Agile and XP as opposed to the UML-style
heavy approach (but even so this is probably drawing the ire of a lot
of people).
Resource-oriented programming is no new idea. The idea of an infinite
resource certainly made me think of Turing machines, and I would no
more want to program such a device as write HTML. That makes me think
of the comments that people program in HTML and WOD rather than
WOBuilder (which I only use occasionally because I'm mainly doing
Java client with IB). But do I want to write HTML - no way, it's just
not meant for human consumption and is best produced by some
graphical interface designer. HTML is not a programming language in
any general sense of the word.
In the MVC world, HTML might be good for the V, but not M and C.
On another level I would say that resource-oriented programming is
not new. A concrete example is Unisys MCP systems that have this most
elegant of structures called a library (somewhat like an OS X
framework, designed by Roy Guck back in about 1976), but each library
is a component that is written to control (and protect) a resource –
any type of resource, be it a device, or database, or other software
resource provided by the OS or any other system.
The library writer would define (in an OO way) the protocol to
control the resource, and when the library ran the API would be
exported, so that other user stacks would be able to simultaneously
access the resource. The library routines (with local variables)
would run on top of the user stacks, but the shared values would be
in the library stack, and controlled in a way rather akin to C.A.R.
Hoare's monitors. The whole MCP system became structured around these
libraries because they were very efficient, not requiring context
switches to access resources (although a monitor could lock you out
until some other process had finished). They are also secure because
the user code can only access the resource through the given library
code.
Anyway, I guess that's a long-winded way of agreeing with Alan in
that I think the 'modified' phase has been glossed over.
Ian
On 15/08/2006, at 2:07 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
Kind of an interesting article from a friend of mine. I have not
read all of it or thought about it too deeply, but I thought it may
interest others so I am passing it on. Alex is, FWIW, a RoR
fanatic. :-P
Chuck
Begin forwarded message:
From: Alex Bunardzic <email@hidden>
Date: August 14, 2006 6:25:38 PM PDT (CA)
I think you've got the basic thing right -- the web is THE
computing platform. Mainframes, desktops, client/servers etc. are
legacy.
There's plenty of talk/buzz nowadays about the Web 2.0. What Web
2.0 really means is that people are beginning to realize that, in
order to do computing on the web, we absolutely don't need those
tool vendors (i.e. Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc.)
For any 'starting from a clean slate' software development effort,
I think it would be rather foolish to go with anything other than
the native web development. And by native I mean <a href="http://
jooto.com/blog/index.php/2006/08/03/transitioning-from-object-
oriented-to-resource-oriented-programming/">Resource-oriented
programming</a>.
--
Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their
overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific
problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/
practical_webobjects
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