Sunday, October 14, 2007

Bloatware vs. Pairing Knife

An interesting post from Eric Newcomer on the HPTS (High Performance Transaction System) Workshop:

For example, one of the Web guys commented that they did not want to have to buy the whole set (i.e. complete product) when all they really needed was a paring knife, yet the only choice they are offered is to buy the whole set.

. . .

"Bloatware" is definitely part of the issue. Ironically so are many of the things a lot of us have worked to define, create, and promote during the past two or three decades around guarantees of atomicity and isolation. None of the Web companies use distributed two-phase commit, for example. They only use it to deque an element and update a database in the same local transaction. So much for all that work on WS-TX! ;-)

. . .

It will be very interesting to observe over the next few years the extent to which the ideas and techniques in the custom built solutions become more widely adopted and incorporated into commercial products. One of the inevitable questions, as raised during the discussions, is how broad the market is for such things as Google's file system and big table, or Amazon's S3 and Dynamo.


The next few years will indeed be interesting as we enter the post WS-* era. It will be interesting to see which middleware companies survive. For one I wonder if Google & Amazon will more completely enter the enterprise integration business by productizing some of their core technology.

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