Complexity June 23, 2008

Iang on complexity :
This is why space shuttles blow up. Why Titanics sink, dams collapse, power grids shut down, and stock exchanges melt down. It’s not because of a lack in the quality of the people or the software, it’s because of the complexity of the system. Fundamentally, if you got it right, someone will [...]

UML : Interaction Modelling March 31, 2008

I was reading Hasaan Gomaa’s Designing Distributed and Real Time Systems with UML.
One thing that stuck me most in its dynamic modeling chapter was how he stressed again and again on setting up all the interaction points at first. Is this the difference from the cool people ? Remember what the grand old man [...]

Local/Remote Computing Transparency February 19, 2008

Steve Vinoski on the different RPC(-esque) systems :

The layers of complexity required to maintain the resulting leaky illusion of local/remote transparency are reminiscent of the convoluted equations that pre-copernican astronomers used to explain how the sun and other planets moved around the earth.

(from some recent IEEE Internet Computing Issue)

Security as an add-on January 31, 2008

Came across this choice quote today from Tyler Klose :
Software products that encourage treating security as an “add-on” typically try to characterize security as something that is extraneous to application “business logic”. Such characterizations are misguided. The main point of a web service is to provide controlled access to a service. In a web service, [...]

Cuppa Rest October 12, 2007

“Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures”
that is the topic of Fielding’s treatise on Rest and the internet. Now, I don’t know why , but this is too often referred to as the “Rest Manual” or the “Rest Thesis”. Of course, the laying down of Rest constraints was the most important achievement of [...]