Labor-Saving Architecture / William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt
This is a fun essay, talking about issues that arise if you have a distributed network of computers and you want all of those computers to be able to send their logs to one central log collection server. They talk about different ways you might want to implement that server. You probably want to think about concurrency. Ideally, the client machines wouldn't care so much about how the server is implemented. They mentioned in passing some project called ACE that they've worked on. It wasn't clear how much of this essay came from ACE. I'm still not sure what ACE does. But this essay still got me thinking.
Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way / Andrew Patzer
Can something partly elegant and partly quick-and-dirty show up in a book about Beauty? Ah, who cares, this was a fun read. Part of the fun: business clients who want the latest greatest buzzword w/out understanding what it means. This essay even had J2EE, but I still enjoyed reading it.
Beautiful Debugging / Andreas Zeller
Brute force debugging. Made me think. In the end, I don't think I much like the approach. Still, it's good when something makes you think.
Treating Code as an Essay / Yukihiro Matsumoto
Matusmoto "Matz", a programming language designer, thinks that programming languages should allow code to be clear and expressive. Then again, every language designer thinks that programming languages should allow code to be clear and expressive--but they can't agree on the details: which code is clearer? This essay talks about some of the issues around language design, but I've already heard these issues as I shielded my ears against various "my favorite programming language is better than yours" religious arguments over the years. I wish he'd chosen something more specific as his topic.
Labels: book, programming