Noah Campbell

It looks like purchasing servers for your brand new web two-point-oh application is a sure way to get a cold shoulder in Silicon Valley.  CrunchBase and Mogulus do not own a single server according to the scobleizer blog.  It did require some changes to the fundamental way they built their application because Amazon’s EC2 is completely volatile.  Data is lost when the virtual instance terminates, unless, of course, you store it in Amazon’s S3.  So forget transaction durability.

On the bright side, Elastra does have a unique solution in this space.  They provide a distributed file system backed by S3 for your EC2 instance.  This is definitely a company to watch.

There is a new pattern for scaling web based systems that is emerging. Cache Farms and Read Pooling.

On the JavaSE 7, JCache is being proposed to provide a cache abstraction although it has been criticized for being out of date. Read Pooling is typically handled at the JDBC driver level or with a JDBC proxy.

There is still a good deal of engineering to be done with regards to these new technologies. I for one would like to see annotations that describe how an entity should be cached, something similar to ETags. At least on the Java runtime, various layers could manage caching much more precisely as requested by the domain object. For example, letting JPA’s cache know what to evict after how long so that clients that can tolerate stale data can coexist.

I’m a huge believer in meaningful communication. Poor communication wastes everyone’s time and negates the messenger effectiveness. Cliff Atkinson is a voice in the pursuit for more effective PowerPoint presentations and has generously posted his ideas in non other than a PowerPoint presentation.

sociable media // PowerPoint solutions

Another great source for effective presenting is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

Outsourcing primary storage. Very neat write up.

SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Amazon S3: Show me the money

Looks like Ilya Sterin had an agenda when he was surveying the existing XML database solutions out there.

Enterprise Java Community: Object To XML Persistence Frameworks: Interview with Ilya Sterin of Nextrials

The initial goal of XQOM is basically an abstraction layer that allows the mapping of XQuery expressions and their result sets to the object graph

If I understand what he’s trying to accomplish, then he’s replicating a BEA product called, AquaLogic Data Services Platform full-disclosure: I work for BEA professional services). Currently, BEA does this with XML and uses XmlBeans to create a generic wrapper around the output, but it can be any XML marshaling technology.

To Ilya’s credit, he is looking at the complete end to end solution beyond just database to XML service layer. He wants a complete XML data source to front an XQuery object mapper/model. It’s about time these XML databases had a chance to shine. Perhaps they’ll overcome the hurdles that object database could not.

One thing that is interesting is that XQOM will encapsulate the XML from a XML store to the java runtime. To some extent, Ilya falls into the very group that he attempts enlighten in his previous post.

I think most enterprise developers today look at XML as an intermediary transport format…

XQOM attempts to do just that. Getting back to ALDSP for a second, the XML expose by ALDSP comes from the underlying RDBMs, but really can come from any J2EE sources (RAR, WS, RDMBs) and be expressed in an XML shape or schema. This is essentially creating a virtual XML database. Add SDO to the mix and now there is a read/write runtime that does what Hibernate, JPA, and JDO do very well.

It appears that XQOM will attempt to tackle the “last three meters“. Even better, if XQOM creates the plugins to Hibernate or JDO* to communicate with SDO or an XQuery/XML backed data source, that would go a long way to promoting XML databases and first class, enterprise citizens.

* Update: Looks like the great minds at JPOX are a step ahead of me and it did not fall on deaf ears.

I’ve been looking for a replacement to InfoPath. Don’t get me wrong, I think InfoPath is a great product and InfoPath 12/2007 will have some incredibly neat features, but it also has some limitations around support XML schema¹. All in all, InfoPath is a boon for any enterprise developer and should definitely be seriously considered when information needs to be collected. Storing in Sharepoint is a no brainer as well. Well, unless you want to actually use that information in a meaningful way.

What would be ideal is to be able to store the resulting output of InfoPath (which is simply XML) into an XML database that allows for advanced queries. Enter eXist database stage left. This is a true XML database and can be run on an individual computer or clustered together for a much more scalable solution². All the output from InfoPath can be stored in eXist, or copied from SharePoint from time to time, so one can process the information. Rapid UI development using InfoPath and extremely powerful XML database features in eXist.

So, why the post about Orbeon? While I think InfoPath works wonders, it’s a proprietary platform and requires a substantial outlay of capital to use. If you’re Sun, Google and start-up, non-profit or OSS, then using anything from Microsoft is out of the question. Orbeon makes form generation accessible for everyone…as long as you’re willing to learn xform, xhtml and xpath. The good thing is that these are standards will eventually adopted by the tool vendor/projects. Until then, Orbeon is attractive for those that like vi, Emacs or notepad. InfoPath provides a great visual toolkit for create forms rapidly, but Orbeon does it for free at the price of approachability.

I’m taking the time to learn Orbeon because I think that all enterprise architects need to understand these standards. The tools will follow, but for now its time to roll up the sleeves and learn some new languages.

PS. Skyoxft also provide commerical support for xform.
PPS. There are XML editors that do support xform editing as well, but typically in a raw XML form, not a gui editor.

1. anyURI cannot be edited and the use of choice groups are clumsy.
2. In terms of availability, I haven’t seen any numbers relating to thoroughput. YMMV

Replacing my home backup server with Amazon’s S3 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

Great analysis between buy your own or purchase a service.