Softwareengineering

I use Firefly (previously called mt-daapd) as a media server for my Roku Soundbridge. It has a feature called ‘Smart Playlists’ that dynamically create playlists based on certain criteria, but they aren’t that powerful - they don’t support sorting or other more advanced query features. Fortunately, underlying Firefly is a sqlite database, which can be queried using standard SQL syntax. This enables a technique of creating static playlists that are automatically re-generated periodically instead.

I’ve thought for a while that build, source-code management, and bug tracking software (which I’m collectively calling meta-software) could, and should, be so much simpler. I’ve written previously about my contention that bugs and features are the same thing, but the problem is wider. Software has a tendency to acquire features over time, and software that’s used to make other software is no exception. Here are some assorted thoughts about how to improve the situation:

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky’s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering.

It’s strange how the same techniques can be used to attack both sides of a problem. For some time now, some of the more sophisticated web spammers have been using OCR techniques to circumvent CAPTCHAs on websites in order to hijack free email accounts, submit comment spam on blogs, and similar forms of mischievousness. As the more capable e-mail spammers seem to be figuring out that anti-spam technologies are getting pretty good at filtering out the crap they send, normally using rule-based detection, Bayesian learning, or a combination of the two, a lot of spam now being sent out is image-based - and anti-spammers are now using OCR to fight back against this new tide.

Google have created a powerful brand based on creating simplicity from complexity (what all good IT is about). Their tools aren’t perfect, but they’ve made life easier for billions, and so I think they still deserve some free feedback from time-to-time. So, a few thoughts: Mr. Google, please develop a podcast search engine. So much interesting content is now being released as podcasts (quick plug for my favourite: EconTalk), that it would be useful to be able to search them.

Marchitecture. I shamelessly stole this from a presentation I attended the other day (names withheld to protect the innocent). If it resonates with you, it probably doesn’t need explaining, but marchitecture is IT architecture that is used for marketing reasons rather than technical ones. Sometimes the marchitecture looks the same as the ‘real’ architecture, sometimes not. Wikipedia’s definition seems a bit narrow (I’m not sure what electronic architecture is anyway), but hey.

IBM Hursley invited three final-year MEng students from Imperial College to give us presentations on their individual MEng projects today (mine, from several years ago, can be found here). They were: Marc Hull, who talked about his project on Balancing simplicity and efficiency in web applications. Marc’s work focused on improving the development of stateful web applications, and in particular on object-relational mapping in Java, in an attempt to allow more straightforward persistence of objects to databases.

One of the things I’ve felt IBM’s been strong at in recent years is the way we embrace open-source as a development model, and as a model for providing software to our customers. Eclipse, which has a lot of support from IBM, is a well-known example, but there are plenty of others. I honestly believe that the provision of open-source software gives us a competitive edge over IT organisations of comparable size.

Joe McKendrick discusses SOA and reuse in a recent blog entry, essentially drawing on some comments from David Chappell that reuse didn’t do as well as predicted in the era of object-orientation, and that SOA isn’t faring well in this department either. Dave Linthicum, in his latest podcast, also discusses this topic. I’m not sure I can comment that widely on the state of current SOA projects, and I would agree that SOA may suffer from similar management problems to that of object-orientation: if developers of SOA systems aren’t rewarded for saving time with a reuse strategy, they won’t be enthused to do so.

I spent last Thursday and Friday in London at the Google offices in Victoria for the first Google Test Automation Conference. The presentation topics ranged widely, considering the relatively narrow scope of the conference, but most were well developed and interesting, even if some retrod familiar topics. Some of the highlights included: Steve Loughran and Julio Guijarro, HP Labs. This presentation was about Smartfrog, a system deployment framework, which Steve and Julio were working on as part of a strategy for system testing.