> At the risk of pi??ing off Sun, the network ain't the
> computer yet. When
> bandwidth is virtually unlimited, and server resources
> approach infinity,
> the game will change.
On the contrary, I believe. There never will be enough bandwidth, nor will
there be enough resources, as we always find bigger and better needs for
them. I believe the only weapon we have to combat poor enterprise systems
architecture is to keep attempting to innovate new infrastructures that
provide the PROPER interactions for a distributed business system while
shielding the end developers from _WHY_ the design decisions were made.
I suppose it's also rather utopian of me to think that we can develop a
beautiful infrastructure of this sort, but I view it as more realistic
primarily because the requirements on how to build a robust, high
performance distributed system HAVE NOT CHANGED a lot over the last 20
years.
[We just never totally understood those requirements. For instance, RPC's
seemed to be a good idea t the time - today that's not quite the case,
explaining the love/hate relationship many have with CORBA or RMI. :) ]
There are a lot of examples of notable steps forward with regards to
encapsulating "expert knowledge" of how to properly design enterprise
systems. From a theoretical perspective, Oliver Sims did just that in his
Business Objects book in 1994. From a product perspective, NeXTStep did it
in the late 80's by literally _inventing_ distributed objects,
object/relational mapping and serialization. Persistence did it in the
early 90's by providing the first real C++ object cache on top of an RDBMS.
Gemstone/Servio did it in the late 80's by providing one of the most elegant
persistence/transactional frameworks ever [and the first ODBMS]. (All three
of these products are still going strong too, through PowerTier, GS/S and
GS/J, and WebObjects, respectively.)
We still have a way to go, but let's not forget how far we've come, and that
the major thing (as always) that is holding things back is politics. EJB
isn't an innovative spec for this reason.
EJB fulfills about 2/5 of what Sims' wanted in his infrastructure, but had
more important goals of pleasing the OMG, business developers, vendors and
the press all in one sweep. That's a tall order. So far, it's done a fair
job at that. Of course, I'm a little disappointed at the adoption rate -
people still seem to be convinced that a highly scalable, fault tolerant
e-business solution can be made with IIS, ASP and some SQL statements.
That being said, EJB is the first real stab at a standard runtime
architecture in several years, so I think the onus is on the industry to
MAKE it work. [otherwise, once again, Microsoft will probably wipe the
floor.... ]
Just my two cents
Stu Charlton
Distributed Systems Developer, Nuvation Labs
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