Monthly Archives: July 2012

All Your Database Are Belong to Us

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In the big open world of the cloud, highly available distributed objects will rule.

ERIK MEIJER, MICROSOFT

In the database world, the raw physical data model is at the center of the universe, and queries freely assume intimate details of the data representation (indexes, statistics, metadata). This closed-world assumption and the resulting lack of abstraction have the pleasant effect of allowing the data to outlive the application. On the other hand, this makes it hard to evolve the underlying model independently from the queries over the model.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2338507

 

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The Rise and Fall of Corba

How Will Astronomy Archives Survive the Data Tsunami?

Cybercrime 2.0: When the Cloud Turns Dark

 

Software Needs Seatbelts and Airbags

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Finding and fixing bugs in deployed software is difficult and time-consuming. Here are some alternatives.

EMERY D. BERGER, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST

Like death and taxes, buggy code is an unfortunate fact of life. Nearly every program ships with known bugs, and probably all of them end up with bugs that are discovered only post-deployment. There are many reasons for this sad state of affairs.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2333133

 

Related:

Finding Usability Bugs with Automated Tests

Sifting Through the Software Sandbox: SCM Meets QA

Debugging in an Asynchronous World

A New Objective-C Runtime: from Research to Production

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Backward compatibility always trumps new features.

DAVID CHISNALL, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

On my way out of academia, before Cambridge persuaded me to return, the last paper that I wrote was a description of a new Objective-C runtime for use by the Étoilé project.1 An Objective-C implementation requires two components: a runtime library that implements the dynamic parts of the language and a compiler that emits calls to this library.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2331170

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Hidden in Plain Sight

A co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks

Code Spelunking Redux

 

Multitier Programming in Hop

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A first step toward programming 21st-century applications

MANUEL SERRANO AND GÉRARD BERRY, INRIA

The Web is becoming the richest platform on which to create computer applications. Its power comes from three elements: (1) modern Web browsers enable highly sophisticated GUIs with 3D, multimedia, fancy typesetting, etc.; (2) calling existing services through Web APIs makes it possible to develop sophisticated applications from independently available components; and (3) open data availability allows applications to access a wide set of information that was unreachable or that simply did not exist before. The combination of these three elements has already given birth to revolutionary applications such as Google Maps, radio podcasts, and social networks.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2330089

Related:

There’s Still Some Life Left in Ada

Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

Purpose-Built Languages