REST is not the answer to all your problems

I've been following Duncan Cragg's REST dialogues for a while, and they contain a lot of useful and interesting ideas. However when we meet in the pub or office we don't entirely agree when it comes to REST.

I think at the root of my concerns is the idea of the underlying protocol and it's relationship to the business semantics. I believe the quality of service and business semantics of the integration solution we are building should drive the choice of implementation, not the other way around. So in some cases we may choose a message queue, in others a messages bus and maybe in others REST.

I'm wary of choosing an implementation and then trying to model the world in terms of that implementation, shouldn't we be doing things the other way around? Personally I think that businesses view things in terms of services, that one part of the business provides a service to another part of the business - with particular expectations around the quality of service that will be provided. So the idea of services seems to be one that is shared between business and IT, it often makes it easier to understand the business need for a piece of integration. To be super clear, when I say SOA I do not mean WS. For me REST and web services are implementation choices I make after I've understood what the business needs, SOA is a nice way to model and understand those needs.

I've commented on Duncan's latest post here, I expect we'll continue to disagree over a pint next time we meet :-)

Is Experts Exchange playing fair with search engines?

I often google for error messages, quite often http://www.experts-exchange.com/ comes top of the results. When I follow the link I see the original question, a bunch of adverts and the answers rendered into unreadable text, the text being seemingly random letters and also obscured by the css settings. I suppose I should just sign up.

But thats not what bothers me, the real issue is that text from the answers gets matched by google, but when I follow the link I can't see the very text that google just matched my search on.

Here is an example:

Google turns up the following result




But when I follow the link I don't see the text from the search result anywhere. Instead I get a message about sign up being needed and a bunch of obscured text.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Misc/Q_22113260.html

I'm not sure why this happens, perhaps the search engine is seeing things it ought not or the site is trying to drive traffic? Either way for now I'm ignoring search results from that site.

Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law

Via Dan Creswell Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law

I'm often told people simply don't think in the right way to be good at writing concurrent software. I've never been convinced by this, Dan's argument seems more compelling: most developers are not good enough to build good concurrent software.