Internet Computing Call for Special Issue Proposals

January 22nd, 2008  |  Published in distributed systems, integration, performance, publishing, REST, reuse, scalability, services  |  6 Comments  |  Bookmark on Pinboard.in

As you may know, I’m a columnist for IEEE Internet Computing (IC), and I’m also on their editorial board. Our annual board meeting is coming up, so to help with planning, we’ve issued a call for special issue proposals.

The topics that typically come up in this blog and others it connects to are pretty much all fair game as special issue topics: REST and the programmatic web, service definition languages, scalability issues, intermediation, tools, reuse, development languages, back-end integration, etc. Putting together a special issue doesn’t take a lot of work, either. It requires you to find 3-4 authors each willing to contribute an article, reviewers to review those articles (and IC can help with that), and a couple others to work with you as editors. As editors you also have to write a brief introduction for the special issue. I’ve done a few special issues over the years and if you enlist the right authors, it’s a lot less work than you might think.

As far as technical magazines go, IC is typically one of the most cited, usually second only to IEEE Software, as measured by independent firms. I think one reason for this is that it has a nice balance of industry and academic articles, so its pages provide information relevant to both the practitioner and the researcher.

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  1. Anthony Tarlano says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 4:15 am (#)

    Steve,

    I would think the following topics should be considered:

    1) The data center as the computer ( what it means to program algorithms for 10^4 parallelization )

    2) Message-based Programming beyond the sequential von Neumann architecture ( distributed computing models such as dataflow, actor systems, overlay networks (P2P) and web services)

    3) Success-based Elastic Infrastructure Scalability (scale in the massive sense: Amazon EC2 and S3, Grid Computing, GFS, MapReduce,etc.)

    Cheers,

    Tony Tarlano

  2. steve says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 7:44 am (#)

    Tony: absolutely! All the topics you mention sound excellent.

  3. jacques says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm (#)

    I would like to add some further suggestions, too:

    1. The use of functional model programming paradigms in the distributed computing (google’s map-reduce, doug lea’s fork-join, etc);

    2. A review of REST best practices when designing distributed systems.

    3. Werner Vogels text about eventual consistency (CAP) and its practical uses.

    4. What is up to date when it comes to language support in distributed systems programming (service definition languages, etc).

    Best regards,
    Jacques

  4. steve says:

    January 23rd, 2008 at 1:04 pm (#)

    Jacques: yes, all those are great ideas too. I look forward to seeing proposals on all these topics.

  5. Mohan Radhakrishnan says:

    January 27th, 2008 at 10:39 am (#)

    I’ve been reading your blog for quite some time. So I would like to see an article about how to go about designing a REST-based system. This article could focus on some of the following issues that a non-expert like me found interesting.

    1. A REST-based system is not necessarily browser-based. (Correct me if I am wrong )
    2. Roy Fielding’s work on the java content management spec. is based on principles underlying REST. How do you design services based on those principles ?
    3. How do you approach the design of a SOA-based system using REST principles ?

    Thanks,
    Mohan

  6. steve says:

    January 27th, 2008 at 10:44 am (#)

    Mohan: yes, someone could definitely propose a special issue on developing REST-based systems.