book

Call for Chapters on REST

August 12th, 2012  |  Published in book, call for papers, REST, SOA  |  Bookmark on Pinboard.in

The following is excerpted from the full Call for Chapters on REST:

REST has gained popularity not only as a lightweight approach for Web Service development, but it also often used to denote a loosely coupled and Web-friendly approach to design Service-Oriented Architectures. In this book we gather contributions on applying REST beyond public Web services (e.g., in pervasive computing applications, cloud computing environments and integrated enterprise architectures) and on results of recent research studies for doing so. The goal is to go beyond the basic understanding of what REST is about as an architectural style and collect emerging and established design patterns to provide valuable guidance for the reader. The book will both give a clear, principled description of REST and show how it has made an impact in the state of the practice as well as provide an outlook on ongoing research advances. Readers will find a good starting point for making sense of REST, its design constraints, advantages and disadvantages, as well as a broad collection of novel practical application case studies where using REST has made a difference. The book is intended for service designers, information systems architects and anyone interested in learning the current state of research and application of the REST architectural style.

Please see the full call for details. I look forward to helping review your submissions for this book, especially from those of you focused on submitting interesting RESTful application case studies.

“Design Patterns” 15th Anniversary

October 26th, 2009  |  Published in book, commentary, patterns  |  Bookmark on Pinboard.in

It’s been 15 years since the publication of the seminal Gang of Four Design Patterns book. Since I was a reviewer of the original manuscript and also have a quote on the back cover of the book, the publisher recently asked me if I would write my thoughts about how I view the book today and how I think it’s affected software development over the past 15 years. You can find my essay along with essays by Linda Rising and Josh Bloch on the 15th anniversary web page for the book. There’s also an interview with the authors linked there, which I found interesting in part because of the similarity between what the authors say about patterns and functional languages and what I wrote in my essay on the same topic.

“Release It!” Is Truly Excellent

November 13th, 2007  |  Published in book, enterprise, performance, scalability  |  Bookmark on Pinboard.in

What if you knew a person who clearly knew an awful lot about large-scale software systems? Someone who earned their way to their knowledge and wisdom by spending days and nights analyzing, measuring and debugging when everyone else had already given up and gone home? Someone considered the “go-to guy” who could always fix things if the system were to encounter a mysterious problem so serious that it resulted in very real revenue loss for the customer for every second of downtime? And what if you could rig up some sort of device to easily tap into the way that person thinks, thereby getting a clear understanding of the rules by which he or she designs, builds, deploys, analyzes, measures, debugs, operates, manages, and upgrades those large-scale systems?

Michael Nygard is such a person, and luckily for the rest of us, he’s already created such a device: his book, entitled Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software.

Success is a problem we’d like our systems to have. So, we focus our energies on building them as best as we can. Since we tend to focus there, books also tend target only that initial development phase. Most books focus on analysis and design issues, or on the methods and processes for doing analysis, design, implementation, and testing. Sometimes you find a book that focuses on debugging, and some even get into performance and scalability concerns.

But I’ve never seen a book like this one. It addresses the truly hard part of software development, which is running a successful large-scale system in production.

The book is a patterns book, but the patterns it presents are concrete. First, there are patterns and anti-patterns for stability and capacity, intermixed with war stories about real-life large-scale systems that failed hard for reasons that wouldn’t ever occur at smaller scales. Nygard’s war stories bring the patterns and anti-patterns into focus, providing very real reasons for their existence, and hard-won proof that they do indeed work.

Following the patterns, the second half of the book discusses general design issues and operations issues. These parts build on the patterns and focus on gotchas, large and small, that keep small systems from growing into large ones. The general design chapters provide numerous suggestions for eliminating seemingly innocuous mistakes that can kill a system as scale increases. Finally, the operations sections put you in the shoes of the people who have to keep the system running in production, describing what you as a developer can do to make their lives easier (thereby making your own life easier too). Along the way, Nygard keeps us grounded by occasionally presenting more stories and scenarios, some of which include actual dollar figures for the choices and trade-offs made. Engineering always comes down to building the best system possible within the allotted budget, but how many books targeting software developers do you know that talk in concrete terms of costs?

Nygard’s writing style is clear and concise. If you read his book and read his blog, you’ll find the styles to be identical. I’m guessing his book’s copy editor didn’t have a lot of work to do to get this book ready for production.

Bottom line: if you care at all about production software systems, you’ll want to read this book.