enjoying salad since 1978.

Friday, September 28, 2007

What's next?

Werner Vogels on Michael Stonebraker's 50X challenge:

I like this challenge, given that 50X is likely to be able to make impact, where 2-4X in general can be easily compensated for by the next generation hardware. But something bugs me about the challenge and also about some of the demonstrations in the papers; 50X is still focused on scaling-up, just as many of the current database systems do, instead of scaling out, which is what the world really needs. The evidence in the paper is indeed about single box performance. This continuing N=1 thinking will never yield systems that can break through the current scalability limitations of enterprise software, regardless whether it runs 50 times faster or not.

I couldn't agree more. It's exciting to see so many people arguing for new kinds of databases, especially distributed databases. Why do I hate on relational databases? It's not the relational part, it's the part where they fail at 3am and wake me up. Joins are nice but I need my beauty sleep.

Friday, September 21, 2007

43 Folders makes the switch...

that I expect a number of others to follow. They just switched from a blogging system to a content management system. Lots of sites that have daily articles aren't blogs but until recently it was easier to have separate blogs and auxiliary sites than to setup a full-blown CMS. These sites are easy to distinguish: they'll have forums, wikis, or other miscellany that aren't simply chronologically ordered notes of interest. For instance, 43 Folders has a Forum, Job Board, and sub-sites like gtd and Inbox Zero.

I always assumed CMS's would get easier to setup and use and some of the more popular sites would switch to them. I fully expect this to become a growing trend and am glad to see traditional blogging tools start to get some competition for serious users.

Update: Earlier, I mentioned in this post that Matt pointed to a site that switched from WordPress to a CMS. I misread it. It was the other way around. Thanks, Jeremy. I hate it when you're right.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Putting my money where my mouth is

I've been going on and on about Scala and lift these past few months to pretty much anybody who would listen. Lift, an alpha web framework for the object-functional language Scala, takes advantage of Scala's numerous features to provide a surprisingly powerful web framework in less than 10k lines of code. Take a look at the lift site to get an idea of what it can do. (Hint: David wrote a wiki in 45 lines of code)

I can see it doing for Scala was Rails did for Ruby.

So when David asked me if I wanted to be a committer, I jumped at the opportunity. I have a couple of patches going in my local SVN working copy mostly related to proper serving of MIME types and caching that I hope to get in soon.

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