While planning for a talk at Cloud Expo Europe a few weeks ago I was thinking
about appropriate metaphors for the way APIs are changing the web. Although
the title was APIs as glue for the Cloud, I think the core metaphor behind it
deserves some explanation: MVC for the Cloud. I thought I'd add some notes
here as to what this might mean.
MVC or Model View Controller is an architectural pattern for software that
seperates out three import things - Models (or Data), Views (visualisation of
that data) and Controllers (operations on the data). Since it's invention at
Xerox Parc in the late 70's, MVC has a had a huge impact on software
engineering and nowhere more so that on Web Applications - there are MVC
frameworks for almost every Web programming language and framework out there.
What I'd call "1st generation" MVC was applied to desktop applications and
gave great n... (more)
P ≠ NP August 7th, 2010, 8:21 pm UTC by Greg
An email I was recently forwarded (a couple of steps removed) from Vinay
Deolalikar from HP Labs:
Dear Fellow Researchers,
I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached
in 10pt and 12pt fonts.
The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas
within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was
uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing
them through a common lens. Second to this were the technical hurdles faced
at each stage in the pr... (more)
It's a shame to see Twitter putting restrictions on client development via
their API (more on GigaOm here). Obviously there's speculation as to what
the business reasons might be - and the effect on the ecosystem - the move
seems more than likely to be about controlling advertising real estate. The
original post is here.
The post makes some valid points about privacy and no doubt Twitters
transition to the consumer mainstream has promted some of this, but it still
seems to be unfortunate step.
Quote from Ryan Carver (via techcrunch):
“We need to move to a less fragmented world... (more)
The MVC for the Cloud meme got me thinking about other principles that might
apply to programming the Web as a whole. A lot of the principle's we
routinely apply to web apps to great effect seem to have analogies when taken
beyond individual apps. While MVC seems a clear fit, here are some others:
DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself! Dynamic Languages Convention over Configuration
Data and Control Abstraction Continuous Integration
Taken together with MVC these also make a lot of sense applied to the cloud.
On the first one, I think it's fair to say we're already getting there:
DRY (or DIE... (more)
They have 400 million users and 500 million people visit the site each month.
Only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have more monthly visitors than Facebook.
And only Google has more page views. And they aren’t done growing yet. In a
year they will likely be second on the list of unique visitors. In two years,
they’ll probably be first.
via techcrunch.com
In all the discussion about the open graph release by Facebook (more here), I
think this is the real point behind the story. Facebook has done an amazing
job of using the power of the network effect to build a huge, active and
growi... (more)
Steven Willmott is Co-Founder & CEO of 
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