Topic: Software Development
On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, learn about the new Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, what it's like to be a Disneyland Imagineer flying over California, the changing face of American R&D and how one entrepreneur is leading the development of IT in Ghana.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a software architecture that describes the use of software services to support the requirements of business processes and software users. 2006 was called the year of governance by those in the industry familiar with the concept. Two of its major experts, Todd Biske and Ed Vazquez of MomentumSI, join Phil and Scott to discuss governance in detal. They define and elaborate on the process, as well as give examples of successes. They also discuss the possible pitfalls when policies are not clearly defined or enforced.
Open Source is here and control over software has shifted from the CIOs to the developers. They can make more decisions on what software to install and use. But with making decisions comes responsibility and the need to meet the needs of the CIO, the users and the local software environment. How can developers ensure everyone else will also be happy with the open-source software that they are happy with?
What is proper balance between open source and proprietary software? Is there a way to quantify software to come up with a good number? In his short presentation, Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz uses the history of the tomato as a metaphor for open source. Using such historical events as the legal fight to have it classified as a fruit to the development of the first genetically engineered tomato, Lefkowitz compares the consumption of five fruits and vegetables a day in a balanced diet to show that a third of an organization's software should be open source.
Backed by popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet creator Mitch Kapor, fueled by the open source revolution, the Open Software Applications Foundation's Chandler remains a personal information manager in gestation five years after work began. Scott Rosenberg, in the new book "Dreaming in Code," chronicles this process and reveals the hard truths that don't change from decade to decade about creating innovative software. Rosenberg also takes issue with the simplicity of David Platt's call for customers to demand that software should "just work."
Ben Galbraith is a recognized expert in desktop application development. He joins Phil, Matt, and Scott in a discussion of current events in technology. In addition to commenting on the release of the Second Life client to open source, the group talks about Ben's upcoming Desktop Matters conference. Ben also reviews such topics as Apollo, as well as the current happenings at Ajaxian.com. His knowledge of both Java and Ajax leads to conversations about the impact of IE7 on the Ajax world and whether Java developers will ever consider aesthetics in future upgrades.
Much has been done to strengthen the three major pillars of open source: licensing, business models and governance. Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps looks at the measures needed to ensure the Zen of Free is protected as we move into the next era of software. Along with the "freedom to tinker", the community must defend the "freedom to participate" without undue controls, and the "freedom to leave", an open-standards based assurance that users can move their data easily between interoperable platforms and services.
When the traffic to your website increases, it becomes all the more important to scale, ensure service availability and survive outages without any impact to customers. Planning for uptime is known as business continuity. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com describes how Amazon guarantees 100% uptime for its platform to its customers, safeguarding them against the perils of unpredictable disaster, and freeing them from the legwork of maintaining an enormous infrastructure.
Why is the typical computer user forced to work with poorly designed and poorly written software? Why is the user so intimidated by many of the computer tasks they do? Phil, Matt, and Scott talk to David Platt, author of the book "Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It". David talks about how unreliable most software is and why many computer users continue to be frustrated with it. He gives specific examples and shows why the operating system often makes no difference. The discussion is both enlightening and entertaining, with many practical examples and suggestions to help correct the problems.
Making movies seems like magic. Behind every magic trick there is a secret. In this case, part of the secret is MySQL. Milton Ngan of Weta Digital discusses their need to track hundreds of millions of files. Data needs to be made available to literally thousands of machines over high-speed networks. Not only is performance critical, but the sanctity of the data as well so many of the new features in the recent releases of MySQL have been eagerly awaited.
