Right before leaving for OOPSLA 2007 I noticed that my colleagues from Live Labs released Live Labs Listas. Listas is a great example of the user experience that can be achieved in modern web applications (i.e., Web 2.0). For that reason a couple of months ago I invited a member from the Listas team to showcase the UX features such as responsiveness, drag-and-drop, etc. to p&p’s Web Client Software Factory team. Great to see it ship and I look forward to other sites providing a user experience on a par with Listas!

A few months ago a CNN crew visited paterns & practices on the Redmond campus. They shot a few videos in our offices built from the ground up for agile development.Their feature on the future workspace has been available for a while now as a 3-part series: the Google Plex, Microsoft Workplace Advantage, and the Perfect Office Chair. The footage from patterns & practices is in part 2, mixed with other Microsoft clips.

Many useful URLs are way too long to memorize or even type. I’ve known and used TinyURL for many years to compress long URLs. A recent conversation reminded me of this service. It turns out that several other options are available. I’d like to see more people use these services to trim long URLs, particularly when they’re printed on paper. Can you imagine typing something like http://spaces.msn.com/members/siteexperts/Blogs/cns!1pNcL8JwTfkkjv4gg6LkVCpw!2085.entry? This is in fact an example from a real printed book. Why not http://tinyurl.com/2jjl2f instead?

My article The Growing Divide in the Patterns World (co-authored with Wojtek Kozaczynski, Ade Miller and Jason Hogg) appeared in the Software Patterns issue of IEEE Software (July/August 2007).

Here’s the abstract:

Recently Microsoft’s patterns & practices group conducted a survey that indicates a significant gap between the patterns expert community and the software practitioners attempting to use patterns and leverage pattern thinking in their daily work. As this gap widens it will lead to an irreversible divide between the two communities, and patterns will fail to deliver their potential. In the light of our experience using patterns to package development guidance as well as input from practitioners using patterns we analyze the key causes behind this gap and recommend a set of actions aimed at the patterns community. Bridging this gap will have a dramatic effect on practitioners’ understanding of patterns and their ability to leverage them as the patterns expert community envisions.

More info off their web site (assuming the server is responding, which is not the case now).I’m glad to see that after over 12 years software patterns are still interesting. How many of the hot topics of 1994 are still talked about today?

My fellow Hillsider Robert S. Hanmer has just finished his book on fault tolerant patterns (to be available from John Wiley & Sons, October-November 2007). Here’s the book’s descritiption, in Bob’s words:

This book presents proven techniques to achieve highly available, fault tolerant software that can be implemented by software developers, software architects and small teams. The techniques are presented in the form of patterns as a resource for teaching developers and students about fault tolerance principles and also as a reference for experts seeking to select the technique appropriate for a given system.

Within the phases of fault tolerance (fault detection, error processing and fault treatment) the patterns will be organized in a way that leads from high-level abstractions to the concrete mechanisms. The collection of techniques will be programming language independent, and will be presented in a way that supports their working together to design fault tolerant software. This allows the designer to build the fault tolerant pattern language needed to solve their unique design problems.

Readers are guided from concepts and terminology, through common principles and methods to advanced techniques and practices in the development of software systems.

This book gives present proven methods of increasing the fault tolerance in a way that helps individual architects and developers. The fault tolerance domain lacks a handbook that provides well-known techniques and practices that are larger in scope than ‘defensive programming’ as many books focus on specific techniques or exclusively on reliability engineering.

I’ve been following Bob’s work and I am very happy to see it come to fruition in this form. For years seasoned programmers have been extracting techniques and insight from carrier grade software. It’s great to see a book on this topic from one of the long time members of the patterns community!

Robert Lucky’s column brings up the question of identity on the Internet. In contrasting the old identity with the new, Google/Flickr/YouTube/MySpace/FaceBook one he points out that “Now you’re at the mercy of what other people and what various computer algorithms think of you.” His example reminded me of an older post about interviewing in an era of long-lived databases. Are we seeing the emergence of the phenotropic identity?

As my list of pointers to free books has started to grow I decided to put it on my web site so I could easily point my friends to it. Here it is, in no particular order for the time being. I have several additional titles that are not within easy reach (the bookmarks, that is). Please do share if you gathered similar pointers.

• Specifying Systems by Leslie Lamport
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel
• Writers’ Workshops and the Work of Making Things by Richard P. Gabriel
• Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community by Richard P. Gabriel
• Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems by Richard P. Gabriel
• Security Engineering by Ross Anderson
• Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software
• On Lisp
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• How to prepare your input (a cookbook!)
• A New Kind of Science
• The Autodesk File
• Handbook of Applied Cryptography
• Graph Theory
• Thinking Forth

If I was a stock broker I wouldn’t buy shares in any traditional (i.e., dead-tree) publishing house right now.

At JAOO 2006 I gave an interview for Software Engineering Radio. Markus Voelter asked me questions about architecture evaluation, the topic of the talk I gave in the architecture quality track. Here are some of the questions that we covered:

• Why would you perform an architecture evaluation?
• When should you perform an architecture evaluation?
• What are the prerequisites for evaluating an architecture?
• How does architecture evaluation fit with agile development?

The interview is now available as a podcast; you can also download the slides from the Talks section of this site.I am surprised with the quality of the recording: the bartender was removing clean dishes from the dishwasher clese by. I don’t know how much post-processing was done but all that noise is not distracting. It was distracting while we recorded the interview so I’m glad that it doesn’t interfere with the conversation.

If you’re going to next week’s QCon in London do yourself a favor and attend Erik Meijer’s keynote Democratizing The Cloud. Here’s Erik’s abstract:

The web is rocking the world of developers. Our customers love consistency. They want to have the same rich experience, anywhere, any time, on any device. Our sales people love market share. They want no platform that cannot leverage their web services. We ourselves have embraced agile methods. We want to keep our options open as long as possible and create software incrementally by successive refactorings. This surely sounds like a contradiction, another impossible triangle. As the Dutch artist MC Escher once said “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible”. Hence we are trying to stretch the .NET framework to cover the Cloud such that it will become possible to incrementally and seamlessly design, develop, and debug complex distributed applications using your favorite existing and unmodified .NET compiler and deploy these applications anywhere.

Erik will show what consistency means; he will demonstrate how agilty translates into what you do right after you go to the File menu; he will prove how you can keep your options open until just about the very end. So if you’re only planning on attending a single QCon keynote, I strongly recommend Democratizing The Cloud. A few hours ago Erik, Jeff Van Gogh and myself reviewed the demos that he’ll show next week in London. You won’t believe me if I’d tell you, so better see for yourself. Do trust me though that they’re cool–I did work on the one involving validation. Hint: you’ll see p&p’s Enterprise LIbrary like you’ve never seen it before.

A recent conversation with my friend and colleague Erik Meijer provided the nudge to finally write about something has been bothering me for some time. So here it goes…The popular view about Inversion of Control (IOC) is that it represents a technique for removing dependencies in object-oriented programs. People immediately think of their favorite dependency injection framework, whatever that may be. That’s nice and well, but is that the real IOC?Consider the following:

• XML was pitched as a language specifically designed to make parsing easy so developers would not have to write another parser. That has happened allright, very few worry about parsing XML today. However while computers spend less cycles parsing well-formed markup, people crippled their languages with angle brackets, end tags, and a verbose syntax. This in spite the fact that the number of language users > number of XML parsers.
• Good SOA design recommends building stateless services. Service implementations that follow these guidelines retain nothing from one invocation to another. However while the services do almost nothing to maintain the state of the service conversation, the developers building service consumers picked up the tab. Again, the number of service consumers > the number of services.
• Web browsers allow people to interact with applications through widgets such as text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, buttons, and a few more. These widgets are so primitive that they easily map into the native widgets provided by the virtually all contemporary host environments. However while the browser happily renders widgets with consipcuous text UI era traits, developers jumped through many hoops to push the user experience closer to what the platforms have been providing for years. And you guessed it, the number of web applications > the number of browsers.

There are other examples but I’ll stop at 3. The commonality across them is that in each case the software is simpler somewhere because many developers picked up the tab somewhere else. Instead of localizing complexity and putting the machines to work so we could enjoy other, more interesting challenges, the opposite happened. We now have to write in a verbose, ugly-looking language that the software can easily process; manage the state of service conversations so the servers would not bother about it; use plugins and pull lots of strings to give the user experience a face lift so the browsers do minimal processing and rendering; and so on. So consider this other way to look at IOC: the software is in control, and we’re working for it. Darn did I take the blue pill?