Thursday, April 29, 2004

Tim Bray on things

Tim is now at Sun :-) and has new things to say.

1. He doesn't like composable message architectures. He doesn't like describing the resolution to non-functional requirements of distributed computing via specifications because it is hard. In my opinion, you either specify your separation of concerns with specifications or make them proprietary. I lean towards specifications. Also, the solution will utilize a building block approach or a big-bang approach. Your call. I prefer building block.

2. He doesn't like automated service discovery (UDDI). I think he misunderstood what UDDI was all about. That's ok, many people do - it is a design time service, not a run time. Throw away the "automated" part and you're a lot closer.

3. He doesn't like declarative application building. He mentions BPEL and ws-chor as examples of this - unfortunately neither of them are valid examples. Actually, I kind of wish they were! Declarative approaches for state based decision making and distributed invocation has a real place in software development.

4. He doesn't like leaky abstractions. Me either, but unfortunately he doesn't give an example.

5. He's concerned about the standards process. Perhaps the new Sun employee should take a look at the JSR process :-)

6. He's concerned that we aren't making it simple enough. Here he has a decent point - it is complicated. Could it be simplified? Sure, throw away functionality and we can simplify it. Keep in things like reliable messaging, self-contained enveloping, trust, authentication, multiple levels of transactions, etc... yea, you can make it as simple as you'd like!

Welcome to web services :-)

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