Technical Happenings

When is open source and standardization right?

Standardization is essential for certain parts of the stack, those items that change least frequently i.e lower in the stack. Higher in the stack needs to change frequently and here standardization kills innovation.  We need to remember it take a lot of time to get to a standard and also Open Source will always be easier to engage with as a develop than a standard.

Open standards can also help open source, as many companies are not interested in using an open source project unless it has a sponsor or is part of a well know organization i.e Apache.  However, it really needs to start open source and move to open standards, just trying to become a standard often leads to the wrong group of people getting involved in the standards process; it all gets a bit political and horse trading occurs over functionality.  But moving toward a standard can also be impossible for small companies and individuals to get involved in a standard, whereas it is easy for Oracle  and others (who have staff with this as there sole responsibility). Also standards can feel like they are dictating  how we should be working and this can grate a little when we are already working well ; Is the JPA better than hibernate – No.

Standards should consolidate the gains made in an area of technology – in effect locking in the gains made and stabilizing prior to further innovation.  The value in standardization in that it can facilitate multiple versions of the technology that can inter operate; innovation.

Ruby has now figured that without some form of standards and specification it is not possible to have multiple implementations that can interact and is now looking at moving in the standards direction.  Without a standard interoperability between systems becomes very difficult.

For smaller projects i think it’s more about blessing by association with the standard(s).  This allowing the potential user to have some confidence in the implementation they are about to try out.

Ruby on Rails

Not having the time to code in Java as i once did, i thought that i decided that it was about time to have a go at a new language.  I selected Ruby and the Rails framework as i had enjoyed the debate i had at QCon and felt that it would help me understand how best to utilize this type of language and framework (  we already use Groovy which is similar  ).  After just a few hours of playing around i could see the draw and after only a few more i was sold.  It is truly liberating to be able to  create database models and code over these on the fly.  I know that there are similar tools in Java, .Net, PHP and others, but the way the whole Ruby on Rails package fits together is great.  Add to this the integration with the InteliJ IDE (my favourite) and you have a great environment and the ability to use JRuby and get all the Java integration as well; my Groovy colleague would argue ‘ why not just use Groovy on Grails‘ and I must say i don’t have the answers at present, but time will tell.

QCon day 5 – BNP Paribas Architecture

A fascinating talk, or maybe a tutorial on how the world of market risk works within BNP Paribas . By outlining clearly the problem space and problems faced by IT departments in the banking world;procurement and strategic sign-off and procurement. You got a good feel for how the architecture came together. In this case i felt that the open source decisions, many made due to restrictions, lead ultimately to success and what i would expect to be a happy development team. Probably the most surprising part of the architecture where a set of processes running from Java Main; it seemed to have come about as application servers where the remit of another team, and asking them for involvement was not an option.