Internet Alchemy

• FludProtocol – flud

• The Fishbowl: Understanding Engineers: Feasibility
  Great translation of engineer-speak to the real world
  (tags: culture geek engineering software)
• Interview MUD creator Richard Bartle on the state of virtual worlds
  He invented the genre and I remember reading about him and MUD back when I was a kid, so it’s great to learn his views on the industry 30 years later
  (tags: article games interview mud)

Bill’s latest post conatains echoes of fellow Talisian Andrew’s recent frustrations with Java web frameworks. Bill writes:

What’s interesting is the culture of frameworks and what different communities deem valuable. My sense of it is that on Java, too many web frameworks – think JSF, or Struts 1.x – consider the Web something you work around using software patterns. The goal is get off the web, and back into middleware. Whereas a framework like Django or Rails is purpose-built for the Web; integrating with the internal enterprise is a non-goal.

Earlier this year Andrew wrote:

So, where to go from here? Well, this is certainly the last JSF project I will be working on, and eventually I hope to phase it out of this current one. JSF is web development for Java programmers – those who don’t know much about web applications and even less about HTML, CSS and certainly DDA.

At first pass I wondered if this was is a case of leaky abstractions, but concluded not. The problem isn’t the abstraction that these frameworks provide, rather that they’re changing the metaphor. The web is document-oriented: HTTP is about transferring documents from the server to the client. That’s a great fit for a lumpy information system. There are many other system metaphors but very few of them fit the web’s semantics, just as a transfer protocol would be a poor fit for an event-driven GUI. Emulating one with the other is likely to be a disaster. Most of the time its good to be close to the underlying characteristics of the system you’re working with. It’s good to know that your communication paths may be unreliable and that there’s latency in your messages just as it’s good to know that your user went on vacation for two weeks and only just picked up your application from where they left off.

However, the insidious thing is that the failure wasn’t because their application was improperly coded to fail if it saw a fruit it didn’t know, it was because the platform they built on was statically typed. Specifically, the Web Services platform automatically converted the XML to objects by looking at our WSDL file (i.e. the interface definition language which stated up front which types are returned by our service) . So this meant that any time new types were added to our service, our WSDL file would be updated and any application invoking our service which was built on a Web services platform that performed such XML<->object mapping and was statically typed would need to be recompiled. Yes, recompiled.

Classic!

• INRIA :: [inria-00162088, version 1] Understanding the Properties of the BitTorrent Overlay
  BitTorrent generates a robust overlay, but this isn’t a random graph: the connectivity of a peer to its neighbors depends on its arriving order in the torrent. A large number of NATed peers significantly compromise the robustness of the overlay
  (tags: bittorrent peer-to-peer overlay research)
• JeNet
  JeNet’s core implements the eNet protocol, which allows reliable/unreliable/sequenced/unsequenced packet sending on top of UDP
  (tags: communication java network enet udp)
• Códice Software: Linus Torvalds on GIT and SCM
  Torvalds slates subversion, although I wonder how much of it is really a slating of common subversion practices
  (tags: svn distributed git)

• FlightAware – Free Flight Tracker
  View any flight’s progress in real time
  (tags: travel flight tracking free)
• Open Source Semantic Desktop Is Coming
  Mandriva is an active participant in the NEPOMUK effort along with HP, IBM, SAP and others. Mandriva expects to take advantage of the Semantic Desktop include a community help desk system and a P2P framework for the exchange of data and information.
  (tags: desktop semanticdesktop semantic-web rdf opensource)

Wow! O’Reilly have just put up the entire archive of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 journal, now renamed Release 2.0. I was interviewed by Kevin Werbach back in ‘99 and was featured in the July issue on syndication (the hot new technology of the day). From page 18:

For a taste of the future, go to theweb.startshere.net. The site, created by British developer Ian Davis, looks crude and incomplete today, but it could be a template for something big: the individual portal. It’s an aggregation site composed of nothing but syndicated content feeds in open formats such as RSS. The My.Userland.Com site offers something similar called “favorite” channels, without the layout options. And the shareware Carmen’s Headline Viewer organizes syndicated hyperlinks with a standalone desktop app. Just as HTML democratized authoring, individual portals could democratize content aggregation.

Davis is also developing an open content syndication (OCS) directory specification for describing and exporting lists of content feeds to other aggregation sites.

In a world of millions of content feeds, it becomes increasingly hard to find anything. This, after all, is what made people turn to Yahoo! in the first place when the number of Websites grew beyond a manageable level. Open content syndication networks cry out for open directories.

Thankfully, efforts are underway to meet this need. One is the Netscape Open Directory (formerly NewHoo), a Yahoo!-like directory that uses a distributed network of volunteers to classify sites. Another is James Carlyle’s xmlTree, a directory of XML content resources organized using the Dewey Decimal System. xmlTree listings themselves are tagged in XML with Dublin Core RDF metadata (see Release 1.0, 5-98), for easy searching by humans or Web-based intelligent agents.

The PDF version has a black and white screenshot of my startshere site, although my recollection is that the original was in colour (I’ve lost mine somewhere). The Internet Archive has remembered it though so you can soak it up in all its glory.

My, how things have changed. startshere.net got snaffled up by a domain squatter some time later in the same black period where I lost openjava.org (sorry Kevin!) due to a mixup with email addresses resulting in me not getting the registration reminders. By then though I’d moved onto building Wapaw, the first ever search engine for WAP content. The creator of Carmen’s Headline Viewer went on to become one of the most influential people in the Web 2.0 age! (Hi Jeff!) Dave stayed Dave and went on to cement his place in history by inventing podcasting and opml. The Netscape Open Directory had a brief fling with fame and became DMoz before fading into obscurity.

I went on to form a startup called Calaba with James Carlyle where we unified his directory ideas with the mobile search engine. We dropped Dewey immediately and worked on our multidimensional classification technology. This eventually ended up being owned by BSkyB after languishing sadly with Surfkitchen for a number of years. At least it’s now being used every day on Sky Interactive. Our main competitor in that space was a tiny startup called Endeca (hi Rob and Wing!) who went on to popularise the multidimensional classification stuff as the faceted browsing we all know and love today.

Fun memories from the Golden Age of Web 1.0

• OTM 2007 Federated Conferences
  Great collection of conferences and workshops – hoping to attend
  (tags: conference peer-to-peer semantic-web distributed computing)

• How to Cold Read – wikiHow
  I’m always fascinated when I see this on TV and annoyed when I see it used to exploit people.
  (tags: wikihow psychology cold reading tricks)
• DIET Agents tutorial
  Interesting appoach to massivily distributed systems
  (tags: agents scaling peer-to-peer distributed systems)
• Geeking with Greg: Google Scalability Conference talks available
  Greg does the hard work and rounds up all the videos in one place
  (tags: google scalability videos)
• Hadoop creator Doug Cutting speaking at OSCON (Yahoo! Developer Network blog)
  (tags: hadoop yahoo oscon)

Some reassuring words from Amazon’s Werner Vogels:

We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.

Over time, this grew into hundreds of services and a number of application servers that aggregate the information from the services. The application that renders the Amazon.com Web pages is one such application server, but so are the applications that serve the Web-services interface, the customer service application, the seller interface, and the many third-party Web sites that run on our platform.

If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application calls more than 100 services to collect data and construct the page for you.

Yeah, I like all that. But I want it bigger and I want anyone to be able to do it

(via Dan Creswell)