Entries tagged with “data design” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

"Underneath the covers, JRun's RPC method invocations are fundamentally a messaging subsystem. When you perform an invocation, in JRun we actually wrap the invocation in a message object....The pattern has been implemented in many ORBs and servers, and in DCOM, and now .NET Remoting. It's probably best described in Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 2. When the EJB container gets the invocation message, it passes it through all the filters, before it gets to the instance. So if you have a transaction interceptor, it gets the invocation first. It pulls off the transaction ID, and discovers the transaction attributes of this particular instance. It does whatever it needs to do for the transaction. It then passes it onto the next interceptor, which may put something on or take something off the invocation message. Some folks consider this a Pipes-and-Filters pattern, and in the default cases where the interceptors are hardwired that's a good match. The concept isn't too different from designs that application developers create with servlet filters or message sinks, though in this implementation the container filters are a bit more dynamic and can account for more dependencies than a servlet filter could," says Sean Neville in this Artima.com interview.

"JavaSpaces tries to accomplish something rather different. Yes, JavaSpaces is data-driven. It is object-oriented in the sense that the entries have type and you can match subtypes, and that entry fields can be object types. But at some point, you get past objects in any system. At some point, you call a method with an integer value. In some languages that integer is still logically an object, but it doesn't contain other objects. At some point, you hit the bottom. JavaSpaces is a bottom point in the sense that it is a way to make an asynchronous method call. You can consider that the entry fields are like the parameters to the method call. The fact that those are data shouldn't bother you, because that is when you hit bottom," says Ken Arnold in this Artima.com interview.

IBM is pursuing 'grid computing' instead of the peer-to-peer computing everyone else is doing.. of course, they seem to include web services and an Internet OS in that category... a good read.

Capability-based Financial Instruments "Smart Contracts: Patterns of Cooperation without Vulnerability A contract is a mutually agreeable arrangement of rules among mutually suspicious parties so they may cooperate with limited risks to each other's mischief. It is a game both are willing to play because both expect to win." Smart contracts are about the interfaces between pairs of nodes.  Self-Organizing...

Is there a relationship between physical geometry and network topologies?

Many manually configured hardware systems can be translated to automatic software services with great benefit.

This position paper puts forth the idea that it can sometimes be useful to merely cache knowledge sufficient to recognize valid data. In other words, we do not have a local copy of a data item, but possess a substitute that allows us to verify the content of that item if it is offered to us by an untrusted source.

New Top-Level Domains (.INFO, .BIZ, etc.) don't expand the DNS namespace effectively.

Microsoft has announced that .NET will allow third party identity providers to compete with Passport. This is a surprising move -- I expected the company to wait until Passport was dominant before opening it to competition.

Invisible Data-Collection Tool Poses Threat to Established Brands Arlington, Va., August 14, 2001 - Cyveillance�, the leading provider of automated Internet intelligence, today announced the results of a study revealing that the use of Web bugs, or online hidden information collectors, has increased 488 percent in the past three years. The results indicate that, on average, a Web page is nearly five times more likely to contain a Web bug today than in 1998. or visit the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/14/technology/ebusiness/14WEB.html

Cracks in the RPC model for the Internet OS.

When will bandwidth shaping and throttling come down to the home gateway, or the OS?

ipUnplugged's NAT Traversal for Mobile IP

I ran across several patents on P2P content delivery.

Civic duty, not anonymity, is the core of Freenet.

In the context of a web of trust, it takes linguistic gyration to make the word "trust" useful. The reason it does get used is historical -- these ideas came out of the security community. But in a modern context the word "trust" is either is so vague that it's useless or is outright misleading.

More data on how UPnP NAT's and firewalls can be traversed in a standardized way. Still waiting for the API to be publicised.

If you get a call from a friend of a friend who needs to sleep on your couch for the night, should you do it? It depends on who the friend is and what the friend says about the person.

Discussing IP issues, Street Performer Protocol, etc.

RFC 2775, Internet Transparency, gives a great overview of most of the network problems inhibiting p2p and shows that prospects are not good.