JP Morgenthal wrote: > in my opinion, this is a resource issue. To succeed, these initiatives > require availability of knowledgeable resources and in each case the > level of complexity has made it difficult to build enough momentum for > any one of these avenues. > > In each case, we backed off to a more simple approach. In one > conference I used the "rats in the sewer" analogy, which made the press > at the time. I will reiterate it here for the entertainment value. > > The distributed computing industry is akin to a group of rats in the > sewer. They run through their sewer pipes making connections and > building communities. Eventually, one rat becomes more intelligent than > the other rats and attempts to move up to a higher level where the food > is fresher and more abundant. So, they find their way up a pipe to > ground level only to end up in the middle of the street swarmed by fast > moving cars or people, and in their fear they retrench back to the > sewer where it's nice and safe. > > Every few years our industry comes up with a compelling approach toward > agility and minimizing the efforts to develop and maintain > software-based systems that have tremendous power, but since the > industry cannot deliver enough resources quickly enough we retrench to > our well-known approaches. Can anyone see WOA in this statement?
A lot of people were employeed in the late 1990s and early 2000s to build web sites using JSP,ASP and HTML. From these 'programming' experiences (single threaded, non-concurrent, non-distrubuted), they became educated enough to think about building server based applications (J2EE, SQL, Servlets etc). Now, we have a whole sewer full of 'programmers' that do not understand the engineering principals that will keep them from getting hit by cars and bicyles as they get onto the main road of enterprise level computing system development. Instead, they reach down into the sewer and grab some friends and comfort and keep using those old, frail technologies because that is what they have experience and (in practice) education for. The resources are a plenty, they are just largely untrained/uneducated/incapable and thus can't make the decisions and execute with any degree of success. Gregg Wonderly
