ארכיטקטים אנונימים

Rendezvous Thread synchronization

arnonrgo — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:30:51 GMT

I am currently implementing Reservation (a pattern for “partial temporary commitment” when using Sagas ).The implementation calls for calling a few of the saga members asking them to reserve an asset. Since network calls can take some time I wanted to make each call on its own thread, collect any errors (failures to reserve or communication exceptions) and then have all the threads reconverge to the initiating thread where any problems will be sorted out (e.g. by retrying the reservation...(read more)

What is maintainability anyway?

arnonrgo — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:19:00 GMT

Reacting to a comment left by Frans Bauma , Ayende recently wrote about “Maintainability” Maintainable is a value that can only be applied by someone who is familiar with the codebase. If that someone find it hard to work on the codebase, it is hard to maintain. If someone with no knowledge of a codebase find it hard to work with it, tough luck, but that doesn’t say anything about the maintainability of a code base. I usually agree with what Ayende has to say, but not this time. First I hope that...(read more)

CRUD is bad for REST

arnonrgo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:46:19 GMT

In one of my previous posts (Rest: good, bad and ugly), I made a passing comment, about how I think using CRUD in RESTful service is a bad practice. I received a few comments / questions asking why do I say that – so what’s wrong with CRUD and REST? On the surface, it seems like a very good fit (both technically and architecturally), however scratch that surface, and you’d see that it isn’t a good fit for either. REST over HTTP is the most common (almost only) implementation of the REST...(read more)

Transactions are bad for REST

arnonrgo — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:17:23 GMT

Yesterday I read an interesting paper called “ RETRO: A RESTful Transaction Mode ”. On the good side, I have to say, it is one of the best RESTful models I’ve seen thus far. The authors took special care to satisfy the different REST constraints, unlike many “RESTful” services (e.g. twitter that returns identifier and not URIs ). On the downside is I think a distributed transaction model is bad for REST or in other words I don’t see a reason for going through this effort and jumping through...(read more)

WCF defaults stifles loose coupling

arnonrgo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:22:28 GMT

This is another post (<Rant>) about WCF default behavior and how it can make the life of developers miserable ( you can also check out “ WCF defaults limit scalability ” and “ Another WCF gotcha - calling another service/resource within a call ”) Anyway, the trigger for this is a post by Ayende called “ WCF works in mysterious ways ”. Ayende posted some code he wrote which was throwing a serialization exception. You can see his post for the full code, but in a nut shell he was defining...(read more)

The web vs. the fallacies of distributed computing

arnonrgo — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:19:21 GMT

I recently read a post by Tim Bray where he states that building on web technologies let you get away with believing some of the fallacies of distributed computing . I personally thinks he is a little optimistic in that claim. On “ The network is reliable ” – Tim says that that the connectionless of HTTP helps (it does) and that GET, PUT and DELETE are idempotent helps as well. I say that GET, PUT and DELETE only if the people implementing the server side make them so – i.e. consider the fallacy...(read more)

Do we have an Active SOA Service?

arnonrgo — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:08:00 GMT

Michael Poulin @ ebizq doesn’t like the Active Service pattern I suggest you read his post first but in a nutshell Michael sees two possible ways to understand the term Active Service: “a) service view - a service that actively looking for companions to complete its own task b) consumer view – a service which triggers its own execution by itself” …and he doesn’t like both… I think that both of these definitions aren’t that far… and I like both :) The way I see it there are two concern here 1. Are...(read more)

REST - The good, the bad and the ugly

arnonrgo — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:34:00 GMT

I recently got a request from Alik for my opinion on REST. I think this might be interesting for a wider audience and decided to blog my answer here. Note: I also have a REST presentation I prepared awhile ago, which is downloadable from here (ppt) The good As you probably know REST is an architectural style defined by Roy Fielding for the web which is built on several foundations (client/server, uniform interface etc.) which gives it a lot of strength in affected areas. The top three in my opinion...(read more)

RESTful WCF

arnonrgo — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:14:00 GMT

If you recall what I currently work on is a type of a visual search engine. In a nutshell when we get a request (image) we allocate a bunch of algorithmic engines in a grid like manner to process the image (e.g. try to perform OCR or whatever). As it happens, we are developing the different components using several different environments(*) - e.g. the control bits run on windows (.NET) and most algorithms run on Linux (mostly C++). The need for easy cross-platform communications and extensibility...(read more)

New Developer & Algorithms positions @ PaperLnx

arnonrgo — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 15:19:00 GMT

PaperLnx develops an advanced visual search solution for mobile handsets based on computer vision and image understanding technologies developed by Rafael. PaperLnx solves the cumbersome web surfing experience on mobile handsets by enabling end users to send captured images from their mobiles to retrieve relevant information for the object photographed. We now have few open positions for the following profiles: Senior Developer We are looking for a highly motivated, resourceful and intelligent developer...(read more)

Microsoft Volta - oh my oh my

arnonrgo — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:05:00 GMT

Microsoft uses the "live labs" to release all sorts of test balloons. Sometimes we get really nifty stuff like Photosynth or SeaDragon . Unfortunately, sometimes we get stupid not so bright ideas like Volta . Ok, so what is Volta? Here's what the project's homepage has to say (emphasis mine): " The Volta technology preview is a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application...(read more)

Ruby.NET 0.9 released

arnonrgo — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:20:00 GMT

While everybody and their sister (especially in this blogging community) is busy celebrating the release of VS2008 . A more interesting* release happened today - The first community release of Ruby.NET (version 0.9) . This is another step in the languages trend I discussed here a few weeks ago. The release is said to have a lot of improvements however, Ruby.Net isn't running Rails just yet. Hopefully we'd have that soon. Another thing I would love to have is to use Ruby's testing frameworks...(read more)

Offtopic: PaperLnx in the news

arnonrgo — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:21:00 GMT

I received a number of inquires regarding PaperLnx following the help we rendered to Yediot in enhancing the quality of the video of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination (The link is to a site in Hebrew). Our business is not video enhancement per se. What we do is use this and other similar proprietary technologies to provide a form of visual search for pictures taken on mobile phone cameras. "surfing" on a mobile phone is not a good user experience, typing URLs and search terms is cumbersome...(read more)

TDD tidbit - Who tests the tests?

arnonrgo — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:18:00 GMT

One question I don't hear asked too much is "who tests the tests?" - after all we are writing all this additional code - if we write so many bugs in our production code that we need tests - what are the chances the test code is clean? The current answer I have is that the code, the tests and the acceptance tests all test each other so if one fails we'll spot the problem in at least one of the others. I hope that this it is a good enough answer... :) What do you think?...(read more)

What is that SOA thingy again?

arnonrgo — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 03:25:00 GMT

Pete Lacey has a post called " What is SOA? " where he defines SOA as follows: " Network Oriented Computing (NOC): An approach to computing that makes business logic available over the network in a standardized and interoperable manner. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A technical approach to NOC that has a non-uniform service interface as its principle abstraction. Today, SOAP/WS-* is the chief implementation approach. Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA): A technical approach...(read more)