Weekly notes: Text pump

Not much news to comment on this holiday week, so instead I'll follow up some more themes from this week's Slashdot discussion of my posting on the obsolescence of J2EE.

It was interesting to see that a couple of comments noted that the 'text-pump' concept described by ActiveGrid's Peter Jared is exactly what Microsoft has designed Indigo to do. On one count, that's interesting because Microsoft people are not stupid. If they pursue a concept, you can be sure that it has a lot of merit. On another count, it means there is now a race in progress. Can ActiveGrid and other open source pioneers perfect this technology before Microsoft does?

One thing that struck me was that several comments talked about not wanting to go back to procedural languages, as if that was the only alternative to object-oriented languages. My perspective is that what is so exciting about moving to a web services stack is that you can move beyond object-oriented to service-oriented, or, better still, contract-oriented application assembly.

Talking of contract-oriented computing, it wasn't a surprise to see Jeff Schneider endorsing the ActiveGrid approach, in terms that are so much more strident than even mine, it gives me great pleasure to quote them in full:

"ActiveGrid made a hard left turn. The company appears to have come to the obvious realizations that no one else seems to have the guts to admit:

1. J2EE is a bloated set of deprecated patches
2. Static Java objects and dynamic XML collide
3. Contract first programming make 'languages less important'
4. If you're in an SO world, you might as well pick an SO friendly language
5. J2EE was designed to scale across a VM that sits on a multi-CPU box
6. Oh, Sun owns Java and J2EE, and what do you know... they sell multi-CPU boxes
7. Rip & replace Intel/AMD/Linux boxes are fast, cheap and reliable
8. LAMP is here to stay
9. The growth rate of transactions inside an enterprise is significant
10. The last-gen computing method will hit an 'economic breaking point'."

Jeff's previous post was talking about 'Contract First' design, which seems to dovetail with stuff I've previously posted about contract-oriented computing and contract-oriented architecture: "Forget service-oriented. It's contracts that matter. Without contracts, on-demand is a limitless commitment."

posted by Phil Wainewright 11:45 PM (GMT) | comments | link