April 2008
7 posts
Research in Software Development
In programming, I find that the purpose of research isn’t to find the solution, but to find the problem. If I find the solution too, that’s a happy bonus.
A 1995 Objective-C Toolkit for Building... →
W3Kit implements a component-based architecture that bears many similarities to Seaside’s WAComponent. User interactions with the application are implemented using a message passing abstraction, and application state is actually maintained across CGI-invocations. The state is saved client-side, through the use of object serialization (no, really) and hidden form fields. The tenacity of the...
New Java HotSpot Internals Wiki →
This is pretty handy — HotSpot documentation can be scarce outside of Sun. Also see John Rose’s Announcement on hotspot-dev.
Temporary Fixes
An externality is an impact (positive or negative) on any party not involved in a given economic transaction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality I talk about “externalities” a lot; humans excel at rationalizing short-sighted decisions if they believe that the long-term costs are external to themselves. This is usually an unconcious decision, but no less costly to a community. ...
Hardware isn't Cheap
I’ve spent the weekend researching libraries, frameworks, and languages intended to improve the web development experience. Many of these frameworks impose classic fork() concurrency model, holding the mantra that “Hardware is cheap”. When developers say “Hardware is cheap” in response to poor architectural choices, what they’re really saying is that “Our...