Today we had a debate on Conway's Law. Following my new passion, the chronicle of software development I definitely need to read "How Do Committees Invent?" by Mel Conway. The interesting thought: should software reflect the organizational structure of the client? And since effectively does reflect the organization of the implementor, has in-house software better architecture?

Provocative enough since we know in-house software is not build with care..

Conway - We shall see in detail later that the very act of organizing a design team means that certain design decisions have already been made, explicitly or otherwise. Given any design team organization, there is a class of design alternatives which cannot be effectively pursued by such an organization because the necessary communication paths do not exist. Therefore, there is no such thing as a design group which is both organized and unbiased.

Yet another study critique.

Linux will NOT conquer the desktop, but gaining some attention through the subnotebook segment

Social-networks will suffer an identity crisis and Facebook will die (wishful thinking).

Your cellphone is a computer! Mobile services on the rise, strong year for VoIP, but even Location Based Services gain.

Video portals will bring the movie industry in serious troubles, but are takeover candidates by big media corp.

Virtualisation 2.0 á la Amazon Webservices: Google will follow, because they can.

Semantic Web: first apps appear which are what flickr was for Web2.0 - an inspiration of the fantasy of start-ups and VCs

Ad Amazon: Kindle is great, and google has a lot in place - say a shopping cart, say a library, maybe a 3G license in the US to follow. The question is about hardware: will they go into a business they don't know? They could still coop with Bookeen, iRex or Hanlin, or - well - Sony

Vista will gain market shares by end of 2008. Bad press but Microsoft is still in control of the market. Apple will get more share of the pie too.

And I will continue my interests into restauration of good old OO-Software Development, against the lean, agile, glossy magazine style software development. I am the Metternich of IT.

Alles walzt...

Get in the ring: Natural Keys vs. Surrogate Keys ... The identification of business objects and the identifier in the persistence store are concepts of different concern: on the object side there is the need to identify a domain entity, while in the persistence layer the focus is on retrieving and storing data efficiently, by normalization over artificial Surrogate Keys. Using the database specific identification in the business layer means coupling this layer to a internal and technical usage of Surrogate Keys. In many projects the Surrogate Key is propagated from the database to the business layer and also to the front-end. By doing so a technical detail - the identification technique of a certain persistence store - is adopted in all further layers, thus the Surrogate Key gains business meaning and the persistence layer is not decoupled from the others anymore.

BTW another original paper: "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks"

In this paper Codd explains the benefit of the relational model in a Mainframe World over a tree based navigational model wich prevailed in the late 60theens. The arguments presented touch me because I worked two years with JCR a pure tree based naivgational model. Its easy to see that a nonhierarchical model in a multi-application environment is superior. But probably it is far more maintainable also in an App-DB world.