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Don Box's Spoutlet » Spending the $100

Spending the $100

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Three weeks or so ago, I rose to Tim's challenge and asked people to help me spend $100 worth of virtual engineering dollars to improve our support for XML/HTTP/REST technologies.
 
Though a few people were nice enough to offer some suggestions, I apparently offended many of the people I most wanted data from by using the terms "Hi-Rest" and "Lo-Rest."
 
While I didn't coin the terms (I don't know who did, but I first saw them in a deck from Nelson Minar), I'm willing to take the blame.
 
My apologies if I offended - that was not my intent.
 
My goal was only to differentiate between the way the web actually works (Sagans and Sagans worth of side-effect-free GETs plus as few POSTs as we can get away with) vs. the way some very dedicated people aspire for the web to work. The two aren't necessarily incompatible, but they are distinct. (BTW, I believe this general statement is true for any technology - what people actually do with a technology ain't necessarily the same as what the original developers want them to do with it.)
 
Of all the traffic I've seen in reaction to this thread, Tim's was by far the most on-target and well worth the read. I have a few nits to pick, but they're just that: nits.
 
Nonetheless, I have this $100 and it's burning a hole in my pocket.
 
YasserS scheduled a kickoff meeting tomorrow to see how we might spend that money to better support Tim's "Web Style."
 
We're still in the data collection phase, so please send Yasser or I suggestions either in comments here or via mail.
 
I'll report back what we come up with.
Posted Apr 12 2006, 05:25 AM by don-box

Comments

Sam Gentile wrote re: Spending the $100
on 04-12-2006 11:24 AM
I don't know many people in my world and customers who give a care about REST and POX. I wish you wouldn't waste any dollars with this nonsense and just get the Indigo bits out with security that we are using today.
Don Box's Spoutlet wrote POX and Indigo
on 04-12-2006 7:29 PM
Mike Parsons wrote re: Spending the $100
on 04-13-2006 4:47 AM
I am thinking that the lack of response may be due to the fact that more and more developers don't care too much anymore about the Indigo bits. I think that Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google, etc have demonstrated that you can build enterprise quality "Services" on top of the bits already available (HTTP GET/POST, REST, POX and to a lesser extent SOAP).
Coupled with the renewed interest in AJAX style apps, XmlHttpRequest, JavaScript and JSON AND the "simplicity" of apps/approach such as 37Signals, I expect to see less and less interest in WCF, WPF, etc. So ... in terms of spending the $100 dollars ...

1. ) Give $50 to Scott Guthrie and the ASP.Net Team to spend on ATLAS ... he seems to be one of the few within Microsoft that "gets" what's happening on the web.

2.) Give $25 to Scott Issacs/Dare Obasanjo and the Windows Live Team To make this platform "thee" platform for Web Development.

3.) Take $19 and buy a copy of "Getting Real" https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

4.) Take the remaining $6 dollars, go to Starbucks and buy yourself a coffee and ask yourself the question ... "Where did we (the "Indigo Team") go wrong in trying to make a platform that is relevant in the Web 2.0 world?
Don Box wrote re: Spending the $100
on 04-13-2006 9:40 AM
Mike,

Thanks for the advice.

I just gave $49 to 37 signals, as I bought a site license to getting real.

I'll spend the remainder of your $51 dollars after I read it.

DB
Mike Parsons wrote re: Spending the $100
on 04-14-2006 6:23 AM
Hey Don ... I hope you find "Getting Real" as refreshing a read as I did. While obviously it is an over-simplification of the whole development process (i.e. I don't think you could necessarily build Windows/Vista this way), it does (or at least it did in me) spark that feeling I had first when I wrote my first dBase III app. That being ... "anything is possible" with this software stuff.

Unfortunately, I rarely get that feeling these days. I get glimmers of it when I see people like Scott Guthrie/Isaac speak and I see the potential inherent in their ideas.

I think the Philosophy behind Getting Real + The Brains of (Scott Guthrie/Isaac + Dare Obasanjo + Don Box)+(some relatively unknowns with some interesting ideas) might just make for some interesting conversations ... and who knows, maybe we can reignite the spark that I think many of us have lost (and wish we could get back).

Mike
Mitch Barnett wrote re: Spending the $100
on 04-21-2006 8:27 AM
Hey Don,

Spend the $100 (towards) on a design tool so that we don’t even have to code this stuff anymore. I mean honestly, I am still writing the same low level source code I did 15 years ago. Compared to other industrialized industries, we are still using hammers and chisels to hand carve out code while other industries use CAD tools and milling machines.

Edward Bakker has gotten a nice start on the type of CAD tool I am talking about at: http://www.edwardbakker.nl/PermaLink,guid,0f4e80f7-2ebd-4ab4-a8b4-954cadfc622b.aspx I am sure Edward has spent more than $100 but at least he is going down the right path in raising the level of abstraction with a tool instead of just more words or more lines of code.

All the best,

Mitch

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