Furl http://www.furl.net/ http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.furl.net/member/ngall.rss Furl archive. Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:20:05 GMT http://www.furl.net/item/26774867/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26774867 Simplicity stems from generality. Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:16:04 GMT Design Users don't care about what the designer does. They care about what they do. If every time you drove a car, you had to learn the meaning of 100 knobs, the whole system wouldn't work. Simplicity comes from tuning down the tasks required to drive the car into a certain set of understood paradigms and tools. Yes, there are many people who would love to pull up the hood and start tinkering with things. You can let them, as long as that is all under the hood. There is nothing wrong with having all those knobs. I mentioned the complexity of Swing before, that JButton has more than 200 methods even though most of the time people care about maybe five of them. My solution would be to design the system so that it had a getKnobs() method. JButton would have 10 methods, including getKnobs(). It would return a ButtonKnobs object, which lets you play with all the little ditties if needed. Then JButton's surface area to a newcomer would be nine methods plus a way to get under the hood. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26774199/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26774199 Never heard of the Wombles, sounds like they were bricoleurs or MacGyvers. Mentions my Shipping Container presentation. Also mentions academic term for the subject "design for appropriation". Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:02:18 GMT Serendipity In the 1970s the Wombles were Britain’s great engineers. They designed, built and fixed stuff by focusing on what was available and what worked, rather than using the proper stuff. There are lessons here for both software engineers and interaction designers. 5 http://www.furl.net/item/26773028/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26773028 HOT principle contradicts this advice. Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:23:09 GMT Complexity The best answer, Dr. Neumann says, is to build computers that are secure and stable from the start. A system with fewer flaws also deters hackers, he said. “If you design the thing right in the first place, you can make it reliable, secure, fault tolerant and human safe,” he said. “The technology is there to do this right if anybody wanted to take the effort.” He was part of an effort that began in the 1960s to develop a rock-solid network-operating system known as Multics, but those efforts gave way to more commercially successful systems. Multics’ creators were so farsighted, Dr. Neumann recalled, that its designers even anticipated and prevented the “Year 2000” problem that had to be corrected in other computers. That flaw, known as Y2K, caused some machines to malfunction if they detected dates after Jan. 1, 2000. Billions of dollars were spent to prevent problems. Dr. Neumann, who has been preaching network stability since the 1960s, said, “The message never got through.” Pressures to ship software and hardware quickly and to keep costs at a minimum, he said, have worked against more secure and robust systems. “We throw this together, shrink wrap it and throw it out there,” he said. “There’s no incentive to do it right, and that’s pitiful.” 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26623928/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26623928 The trend is beginning: open standards for social networks. Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:35:51 GMT Social Software The building blocks for portable social networks already exist. OpenID, microformats and Oauth let us build open, user controlled networks. We'll talk about why this is good for users, how to actually put these building blocks in place and why portable social networks will ultimately be very good for business. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26587193/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26587193 There are even VC funds focused exclusively on Facebook. Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:57:41 GMT Social Software SaaS Thousands of software developers are creating features for Facebook, the rapidly growing social network, many hoping to strike it rich alongside Facebook’s own employees. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26438496/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26438496 Another early (2000) use of SOA. Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:13:28 GMT Service-Oriented Architecture In this position you will analyze, design and implement application systems for the Client One Applications Infrastructure team in support of the Branch Division. Position will be assigned to projects within the centralized Data Program involving Service Oriented Architecture development on the Tandem platform. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26438311/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26438311 Shows SOA was already a technology concept in 1998. Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:11:00 GMT Service-Oriented Architecture Function Address technical infrastructure requirements as clients move towards new business models and technologies. Service offerings cover the full life cycle from technical architecture to implementation and commissioning of new technical infrastructure. Required Skills Successfull track record in enterprise wide technical infrastructure development. Presentation,negotiation and facilitatation skills. Strong organization and interpersonal skills(Ability to work on multiple concurrent assignments) Management of client relationships at all levels. Technical Disciplines Infrastructure Standards(OMG,The Open Group,Microsoft Standards) Service oriented architecture model for distributed computing(Corba model,DCOM/ActiveX,Message Brokers,transaction management and the migration to Object Transaction Monitors) 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26437659/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26437659 Here is an IBM paper circa 2001 that defined SOA in terms of the publish, find, and bind triangle. Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:56:29 GMT Service-Oriented Architecture An architecture for dynamic e-business Enter the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA [see Resources]). SOA is a conceptual architecture for implementing dynamic e-business. Today, most of the systems and applications running in the business world are made up of tightly-coupled applications and subsystems. The drawback with this is that a change to any one subsystem can causes breakage in a variety of dependent applications. This brittle aspect of existing systems is in part responsible for the high cost of system maintenance and the limitations around the number of trading partners one can manage. SOA is not a new concept. In fact, about a year and a half ago, HP's e-speak appeared with a marketing campaign built around a proprietary implementation of SOA. Due in part to its proprietary requirements, e-speak failed to make much of a market impact. As recently as February 2001, HP revamped their software strategy to embrace the coupling of distributed components via SOAP, but they remain partially proprietary on the service interface definition language (IDL) of their solution. Nevertheless, the potential concept of SOA was found to have merit by companies like IBM and Microsoft who recognized that for SOA to succeed where other distributed computing concepts had failed, it must be implemented on open standards. Thus, the recent cooperation between these companies on recommended standards like UDDI and WSDL. More on that later! Regardless of the implementation, SOA is comprised of three participants and three fundamental operations (see Figure 2). 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26437553/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26437553 This IBM Whitepaper from September 2000 is the earliest use of "service-oriented" applied to Web Services that I can find. This was around the time of the joint backing of Web Services by Microsoft and IBM. Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:54:09 GMT Service-Oriented Architecture The Web Services architecture describes the principles behind the next generation of e-business architectures, presenting a logical evolution from object-oriented systems to systems of services. Web Services systems promote significant decoupling and dynamic binding of components: All components in a system are services, in that they encapsulate behavior and publish a messaging API to other collaborating components on the network. Services are marshaled by applications using service discovery for dynamic binding of collaborations. Web Services reflect a new service-oriented architectural approach, based on the notion of building applications by discovering and orchestrating network-available services, or just-in-time integration of applications. 3 http://www.furl.net/item/26433009/forward http://www.furl.net/item/26433009 An early use of "service-oriented architecture" jointly by IBM and Microsoft at the W3C Workshop on Web Services. Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:56:35 GMT Service-Oriented Architecture The XML Protocol work is the foundation for a Web Service framework within which automated, decentralized services can be defined, deployed, manipulated and evolved in an automated fashion. The purpose of this document is to outline a framework for evolving XML Protocol’s functions. This framework provides a structure for integration and a foundation for protocols that will support the needs of such service-oriented applications. The goal is a scalable, layered architecture, one that can appropriately meet the needs of both simple and extremely robust high-volume deployments. As with other Web technologies, the focus is on enabling ubiquitous interconnectivity of entities and organizations dispersed throughout the world. 3