Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Virtues, Languages, and Choice
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Dear Readers,
This week we have some very interesting reading. Start with James
Turner's piece, "The Virtues of Monoculture," and you'll see what I
mean. If you are an open source person you have to ask yourself this: do
we need marginally different projects for no apparent reason
other than that "we can"? I am all for free choice, but doing something only for
the sake of doing it can divide the OSS community. Do you
think Microsoft does this in its product design teams? Check out what
James has to say here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/the_virtues_of_monoculture.html
Articles
In the spirit of our choice-is-important viewpoint, each article this week
has used a different programming language for example code. Choice
*is* important.
The first article is about how data warehouses support complex ad-hoc
querying by end-users. In "Building a Data Warehouse with MySQL and
Perl," Sam Tregar describes the basic parts of a data warehouse and
outlines how to create one with Perl and MySQL. Data warehousing is a
deep topic, and this article will hopefully pique your interest to roll
your own. Check it out here:
In our second article, Thakur Thribhuvan describes how temporary
destinations are a useful tool in message-driven architectures in his
piece, "Designing Messaging Applications with Temporary Queues." In
this article, Thakur looks at the benefits and drawbacks of using
temporary destinations in an enterprise healthcare system. He also
looks at design perspectives for using temporary queues as an
alternative to static queues and explores some design strategies using
synchronous requests and replies. Check it out here:
In our third article, "Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction
to the Heart of Rails (Part 1)," Gregory Brown shows how the Rails web
framework is well suited for the "M" of Model View Controller (MVC).
You don't have to be a Ruby or Rails guru to understand this tutorial. The
first part of the article walks you through Object Relational Model
(ORM) fundamentals using ActiveRecord by example. The second part builds a
small but functional application to show how ActiveRecord
works within its setting and in concert with the other toolsets Rails
provides. Check it out here:
Blogs
The top three blogs at the moment are listed below. They all have
something in common. They, too, are talking about choice. They have
plenty of comments as well. Go see what they have to say:
1. Erica Sadun's "Blog bleg: Help me pick a language"
http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/04/blog_bleg_help_me_pick_a_langu.html
2. Curtis Poe's "XML Versus TAP"
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/xml_versus_tap.html
3. Preston Gralla's "Why Linux Will Never Take Over the Desktop"
http://www.oreillynet.com/windows/blog/2007/04/why_linux_will_never_take_over_1.html
Podcasts
We don't exactly have a new podcast this week, so I thought I would point
out a new Video service available from our friends at Safari.
Safari's integrated collection of online books, videos, and article
content is available from no other source. The online training videos in
the Safari Library cover a wide range of topics. Check out a sample at:
http://safari.oreilly.com/video
Stats
Well, I have some interesting data to report on. Where are all the
sysadmins? I did some analysis of our book-purchasing audience. This
is a time-oriented graph. If you notice the spikes on the "Consumer"
trend line, those represent the end of each year. Consumer purchasing
reaches a peak at the end-of-the-year holiday period. Consumer means
people who buy computer-oriented books like Ipod, Digital Photography,
etc.--books that are not for software developers, system
administrators, or other computer science types. So look at the decline
for system administrators. That is certainly interesting to me. Could
it be that there are no really new IT admin tools or technologies to
explore?
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/04/where_are_the_sys_admins.html
Comments
Any comments, ideas, or thoughts on features or content you would like to
see on the O'Reilly Network can be sent to ideas@oreillynet.com. If you
want a response to your email, please indicate that because we do not
reply unless you request it.
Mike Hendrickson
General Manager,
The O'Reilly Network
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