For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.
The idea that an application wears its state information on its sleeve, readily available for users to bookmark, modify, and trade, is an underappreciated strength of Web-based software. As the RIA bandwagon picks up steam, let's honor that idea and find a way to move it forward.
The way forward, Geer suggests, is not to abandon ACLs but rather to augment them with aggressive monitoring that holds people accountable for behaviors that can’t economically be permitted or denied.
A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
...collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest.
Discussions about open source and innovation tend to cluster around two opposing memes. One says that open source can't innovate; the other that only open source can innovate. Both are wrong.
Bosworth's hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need -- both offline and online.
Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions.
Fault tolerance, service-level agreements, access control, and business activity monitoring are among the many things enabled by intermediaries that watch (and sometimes transform XML) message flows.
We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash, but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all.
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
"His current technical interests include alternative transaction models, aspect-oriented programming, statistical modeling of distributed applications, and streaming XML"
"I'm short and I have the remnants of a southern accent," Paul says in a recent interview. Co-founder of Digital Creations, now Zope Corporation, Paul evangelizes the powerful Zope/Python combo.
CTO of Propylon, and previously co-founder of Digotome, Sean has served as an invited expert on W3C committees, and is a widely respected authority on XML.
I did a double-take when I finally caught up with the Sept 5 issue of the New Yorker last night. The theme of the issue is food, and Malcolm Gladwell's contribution details a research and development project to develop a new kind of cookie. The subject of the piece is Steve Gundrum, who runs a food R & D company called Mattson and is also -- it turns out -- an armchair software theorist. Gundrum decides to organize the project into three teams:
The XP (extreme programming) team, two talented employees who would work as a pair and iterate rapidly.
The conventional team, led by a star manager at the company
The open source team, an elite group of fifteen stars recruited from around the industry who would collaborate online.
The open source team is favored to win the bakeoff, but creative friction and communication overhead take their toll, and instead the conventional team wins, followed by the open source team, with the XP team far behind. Gladwell turns to Joel Spolsky who offers this comment:
One of the reasons open source works well for Linux is that there isn't any real design work to be undertaken. They were doing what we could call chasing taillights.
Them's fightin' words! But while Andrew Morton, co-maintainer of the Linux kernel, puts a different spin on things, I don't think he'd wholly disagree. In his fascinating talk at SDForum he notes that the modularity of the Linux kernel makes it unusually amenable to decentralized development. And he sees Linux's innovation more in terms of economics than technology:
All these IT companies are congealing around this stack of free software which nobody owns -- or if you like, which everybody owns. This allows lots of different competing industry players to use the same basic set of system software without relinquishing control to the provider of that software. These are, frankly, old technologies -- ten, twenty years old. There's no real intellectual value left in these things.
What about the higher levels of the stack? This comment surprised me:
When you have end-user customer-facing applications, my own personal belief is that's just not an area in which open source is going to play. If these applications are sufficiently useful and interesting that people are willing to pay for them, it doesn't make sense to me that you should develop a high-value contemporary modern application using open source.
Although Steve Gundrum's experiment was hardly rigorous or conclusive, it does touch on a real issue with open source. Striking a balance between an architecture of participation and an architecture of control is a central concern for all kinds of product development. In the case of most successful software applications that ride above the commodity stacks, the balance we've struck so far typically locates participation outside the API boundary. Whether that can change, and whether it should, are two very interesting questions.
 
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