Month: April 2003

design reuse

being open source is not enough. for a small startup like wyona, it is important to grow a community around our project. apache lenya is standards-driven, probably more so then most content management systems. but why stop at the plumbing level? for all users care, having your data in xml and your framework open source doesn’t give them immediate benefits.
this is where reuse at the site level comes in. real problems are not solved by frameworks per se, but rather with concrete uses of the framework on a real site. we therefore encourage the sharing of and collaboration on complete sites, with navigation, information architecture, workflows..
in due time, it should be possible to capture best practice in sample publications, and thus distribute improvements to these default publications to all our customers.

Dependencies

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn’t just a Web server, it’s a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago about building corporate component libraries. But the problem is that by simply having that code there, you didn’t have the context.

software is plentiful these days, talent to make heads and tails of it not. who wants to write software from scratch? not me. i always found it more interesting to stitch something together from existing parts, usually losing interest after a solution started to manifest itself.

What always frustrated me, in computer science, was how we learned all the low-level things — which we have libraries for nowadays — but we didn’t learn large-scale integration. What’s the skill set to be able to jump into the code base of something like Mozilla, read the architecture docs, and figure out the makefiles? Computer science classes don’t teach you how to dive into foreign code bases.

you need capabilities to:

  • analyze and visualize a code base
  • identify the community leaders
  • learn the community customs
  • understand the real scope of a piece of software

It’s becoming a game of free agents, and by operating in this public and transparent way, free agents advertise themselves — as a brand — along with the products and components they have expertise with.

right on. no longer is software production a solitary discipline, with engineers huddled over manuals and out of sight in some cubicle. rather, in a world where you cant possibly write a significant portion of the code you gonna need, the person with the best social skills wins.

Academic rescue

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with a phd potentially in the cards for me, and doro well on her way to get one, services like these come to the rescue 😉

virtual xml

Using the ObjectXPathNavigator over an object graph provides the power and flexibility of the XML programming model without the overhead of having to serialize an entire object graph into an XmlDocument.


the xml mindset is spreading to the abstract world of in-memory representation. if you go to all that trouble to learn xpath, you might as well use it 🙂

BBC commons?

Kevin Hinds is the Head of Technical Development at BBC News Interactive:

Larry Lessig came to give a talk a while ago and there’s some serious interest in making much more of our non-commercial archive available under some kind of Creative Commons license.

right on. one would hope that others could figure out a business model that balances the need for escaping obscurity with the need to make money.