Monthly Archives: October 2004

Open source Open What??

Found via LinuxFR a very good report about OpenSource. Everything you ever wanted to know about open source without ever asking!
This is a work of great quality and I believe objectivity, this paper is a strong piece to convince management to use open source software.

Here is the table of content:
Executive summary – Key messages
• Open Source: a r/evolution in the software industry ?
1. Open Source: definition and history
2. PROs and CONs of Open Source
3. Is Open Source really changing the software industry ?
4. Open Source in the company
5. Migration path to Open Source
6. Review of cases
7. Case study, NewCo in Electricity Distribution

– Web site of the author: Salvino A. Salvaggio
– Direct link to the pdf file

Best text editor for windows

Every coder need to master a good textEditor to be productive. If you’re not a vi or emacs fan you probably use Texpad or Ultraedit.
I use to be a Textpad guy. But I’ve just stumble upon pspad  and I’m not going back.
Probably as good as Textpad and Ultraedit together and best of all it’s a freeware!!

Rest architecture

I see more and more blogs using the word REST which stand for Representational State Transfer, but what the heck does this means??
Did my googling and found that the REST architecture was first described in this paper a very good read indeed.
Here is what I’ve learnt from it. If you consider the World Wide Web as one huge distributed application, REST is the architecture for this application.
WWW being such a successful distributed application it is very interesting to put a layer of abstraction on its architecture. This enables us to extract the main properties of the World Wide Web architecture and understand why it is so good.
First the WWW protocols are mostly stateless => which is good for scalability
WWW resources are cacheable => performance
WWW resources are available through one generic interface => better interoperability and ease of extension.
WWW has a layered architecture => decoupling of components, ease of maintenance and evolution

Examples of REST API include:
http://www.bloglines.com/services/
http://del.icio.us/doc/api
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/request.rest.html

Three very successful services.