Middleware Matters

Today (August 10) I'll be presenting a webcast entitled "Extending CORBA Systems." There are many successful, critical, high performance, and reliable CORBA systems in production today, but as with all types of middleware, people are trying to get even more value out of them by linking them more widely with the rest of the enterprise. This webcast is about how to make CORBA systems more widely available in your enterprise via our Artix product, which, as more and more customers are discovering, is unmatched for integration flexibility and performance.

The webcast is at 1 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Click here to register. Hope to see you there!

Mark says:

For everybody I know who came from a CORBA/DCOM-like distributed systems background, but now understands the Web, serious mental model rewiring occurred. If you haven't had that rewiring, you don't (yet) get the Web.

Hmm. I emailed Mark and told him that even though I have a CORBA background, I feel like I understand REST and the Web -- I wrote about it in my "Toward Integration" column two years ago now, in fact -- and I don't recall having undergone any major brain rewiring. I suppose I could be wrong, and that I don't really get it after all, but nobody beat me up for that article. Maybe nobody read it.

I also suggested to Mark that perhaps he should write a "REST test" that we CORBA/DCOM types can take so we can tell for sure. ;-)

Python has been mentioned in a lot of blogs lately -- Jon's, Sean's, mnot's, Bill's, Tim's, and my own, for example, and of course also in the wonderfully useful Daily Python-URL. I wouldn't call myself a Python expert by any stretch of the imagination, so the other day I picked up another Python book: Mark Pilgrim's "Dive Into Python."

I read about half of it on a flight from Dallas to Boston today. It's easy to read and extremely informative. It doesn't mess around trying to teach you little language features at a snail's pace like most books. Rather, it just keeps throwing code at you -- useful and interesting code, unlike the examples in most books -- and then explaining it in just the right amount of detail. I can't wait to read the rest of it. I highly recommend it to everyone.

I've been doing a lot of conference-related work lately. As a co-chair for DOA with Vinny and Werner, I recently had to go through the paper selection process. It's never any fun, especially when some of the PC members don't do their reviews! But we got through it, and put together our list of accepted papers and posters. Overall DOA is looking like it'll be a good conference again this year.

Earlier this week I finished reviews for two other conferences as well. One is the ICSOC conference. Reviews were due Tuesday, so to the best of my knowledge the paper selection process isn't finished yet. The papers I reviewed were OK for the most part, except for one that was absolutely dreadful. You have to wonder sometimes whether people who submit such papers have ever read any papers accepted at other similar conferences? Or do they just write something without checking references, related work, etc., and just blindly submit it?

Reviews were also due earlier this week for The 3rd Workshop on Reflective and Adaptive Middleware, to be held at the Middleware 2004 conference. Reflection and adaptivity are important aspects of modern middleware and have been gaining dramatically in popularity lately, so while reviewing I wasn't surprised to find that some of the submissions to this workshop were quite good.

Phew! That's it for conferences for the next while -- so maybe I can get back to writing some code! -- except that I still need to come up with a title and abstract for my JAOO talk next month. I'm uncharacteristically late in submitting it. It's in the SOA track, so at least I know what the theme needs to be.

I installed the Mac OS X 10.3.5 update on my home iMac 800 MHz G4 the other day, and now the machine refuses to stay up. I don't even run any weird 3rd party apps that sometimes cause this sort of thing. I boot the machine, it stays up for about 2-3 minutes, then it either freezes or the system just panics and tells me that I need to reboot.

My advice? Stay away from 10.3.5, at least until they can fix this. Apple, you're supposed to be better than this.

Update: After some more investigation into the problem, and after trying some of the usual fixes and workarounds without success, I discovered by running some hardware diagnostics that I appear to have some sort of video RAM problem with my iMac that isn't uncommon. There's even a Yahoo group devoted to discussing it. Very sad. If it's this common, then Apple should do a recall and fix it, just as they're doing for certain iBooks that appear to have similar problems.

The power trio may be the ultimate configuration for a blues or rock band. Think about Cream, ZZ Top, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Triumph, Robin Trower, ProjeKct Two (a King Crimson subproject comprising Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, and Trey Gunn), and Beck, Bogert, and Appice (Jeff, Tim, and Carmine, respectively), for example. Even when a trio is led by someone as gifted as Jimi or Stevie Ray, each musician in the trio is still effectively out front, hiding behind nothing. They have to be on top of their game and not just playing simple rhythm because the listener can clearly hear everything. For example, when Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton played together in Cream, both were often, for all intents and purposes, soloing simultaneously.

I saw two power trios within the past week: Rush last Thursday at the Boston Tweeter Center (with my daughter), and Joe Bonamassa at the Scullers Jazz Club last night (with my brother Jim). Both bands were simply incredible.

Even though this is their 30th anniversary tour, Rush is playing better than ever. They played seemingly everything they'd ever written, and even played some covers such as The Who's "The Seeker," The Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul," Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," and even Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" in a Cream-like fashion. Neil Peart performed an amazing drum solo, except that he sounded more like a whole drum orchestra all by himself. They had a camera above his head and showed the whole solo on the Jumbotron -- very cool. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson did a little acoustic set as well. Rush wraps up their North American tour this coming Sunday in Toronto, but will begin a UK tour in September.

Joe Bonamassa! This kid is simply an unreal guitar player. In addition to their own excellent songs, this band sometimes uses their encyclopedic knowledge of blues and rock guitar to augment their songs with refreshingly inventive combinations of teasers from other songs by bands such as Yes, King Crimson, ZZ Top, and others. They even covered "Had to Cry Today" by Blind Faith, but a little faster than the original. Go see Joe if you can, you won't be disappointed.

What does this have to do with middleware? Well, I think Don Box (bass), Doug Schmidt (guitar), and I (harmonica) should form a power trio.

Jon Udell writes about the scalability myth. How true! I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw a reasonable solution get rejected because of misplaced or erroneous beliefs about scalability and performance.

Jon's article reminds me of an article I wrote awhile back, "The Performance Presumption." I wrote it as a reaction to what seems to be a common misperception in the middleware world: that "high performance" automatically means "high quality" and thus "the best answer." That's just an extreme case of premature optimization. Depending on the specifics of the problem at hand, other qualities such as configurability, flexibility, manageability, deployability, versionability (if that's even a word), and others often matter more.

At next week's OMG meeting in Montreal, one thing I hope to achieve is getting the OMG to issue an RFP for a CORBA binding for WSDL. WSDL is explicitly designed to be extensible, and allowing it to used as a service abstraction over existing CORBA services has proven to work extremely well in practice. For example, we have an Artix customer who has saved quite literally millions of dollars in hardware and J2EE middleware licensing costs for their customer care system by fronting their existing back-end mainframe CORBA systems with Artix and WSDL, allowing their stock .NET clients to transparently and securely access their CORBA-based customer care systems. The customer achieved all this without needing to redesign or redevelop those CORBA services, or even touch them at all.

Some, such as Savas, think such a binding is "the wrong thing." However, as I implied in my review of Savas's and Jim's Web Services Journal article entitled, "Why WSDL Is Not Yet Another Object IDL", there's a great deal of misunderstanding out there about exactly what CORBA IDL is, and in fact about what CORBA is. Savas seems to complain that a CORBA binding for WSDL means a loss of focus on the messages that are exchanged. Hardly! If anything, it enhances that focus. In fact, it allows properly-constructed applications, or applications built on the right middleware, to focus entirely on the exchanged messages, and not worry about the details of underlying object models, or about tying themselves so tightly to SOAP that they'll have to be thrown away and rewritten when the next silver bullet protocol comes along.

Unfortunately many out there seem to think that CORBA IDL implies concrete objects. Umm, no. Don't mistake the fact that most CORBA systems have been implemented in OO languages for the fact that CORBA says absolutely nothing about object implementations. The implementation approach has pretty much nothing to do with CORBA itself. People seem to have a real tough time keeping this straight. Also, since it doesn't fit their arguments, people conveniently ignore the fact that CORBA even allows you to implement each operation within an interface as a whole separate program! (In fact, DEC's old ObjectBroker ORB supported exactly this.)

Repeat after me: CORBA objects are virtual. I explained this in a fair amount of detail in Michi's and my book, and Jacek explains this pretty well, too. These objects simply don't necessarily exist as "physical" entities the way objects do in Java or C++. When it comes down to it, CORBA interfaces are really just a way of combining and grouping operations into coherent services, implying nothing at all about whether actual objects, with all the things that that would imply, exist underneath it all. That's why, when it's done properly, a CORBA binding for WSDL is a pretty natural fit, and why fears of it causing us to forget the importance of the message are totally unfounded.