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Showing posts from October, 2009

The Squirrel on Cloud Computing

[Concrete/Important] The Squirrel is pulling his tail fur out – I’m surprised he has any fur left. He’s been trying to convince the Bears that Cloud Computing is important and in paw’s reach but the little Acorn ERP is just too big to get up into the clouds. The first push back came from Little Bear, and the Squirrel was expecting this. “Cloud Computing is not really aimed at us” said Little Bear. Little Bear is scared, probably has too much on his plate. And he’s been nurturing the Acorn and building this huge Oak Tree. In a way, he’s right, though Squirrel. The Cloud is not for our type of ERP, not today. We need to be lean and we need to change if we’re going to live in the Cloud. And it’s the same for On Premise and Hosting – storage may be cheap, but the more structured the requirements, the higher cost per GB. And it’s costing us an arm and a leg to host our Oak Tree. “No way will we be able to manage a forest of Acorn ERPs, not unless we change...” replied the Squirrel. “

Is your code RESTful

[ Concrete/Important ] Well nearly, but not 100% - well not yet. A few years ago I wrote an HTTP GET/POST web service (sounds RESTful) between a Windows CE.Net client on a hand held device and an Apache server running a light SOAP Web Service. It wasn’t hard to write but the messages were specialized, so fell short of being a true RESTful implementation. REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer and refers to an architectural style or pattern. In essence it describes clients served by services where state transitions or transfers in the client take place through the representation of a new state in the data returned by the service. Web applications architected in this way have stateless servers and would typically map messages or web service requests onto the HTTP verbs GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. At its core, my latest project http://www.far2muchmail.com/ , uses messaging between an Outlook desktop client and a web service. The web service is in PHP and not currently highly sc

"Better to say nothing and be thought a fool..."

[ Abstract/Important ] "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - I read this on one of my colleague’s Skype. Made me wonder ‘why do people say this sort of thing?’ and I was reminded, this is something my Dad used to say to me. I guess some people say this because they believe it to be true. Seems reasonable, maybe that’s why Dad used the phrase. Sometimes people use the phrase because they have nothing better to say – now that’s perverse. Although not every topic attracts or even deserves debate, I believe that if a debate is offered, one almost has a duty to present one's views. More so, at the risk of saying something foolish, in any debate of weight, whether or not your view is solicited, you must speak up. To do otherwise is indeed foolish.