the reflexions insider

Cloud computing is all the rage these days. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures gave an interesting talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC recently which covered some of the implications of cloud computing. At the Web 3.0 Conference there was a lively discussion about some of the more technical issues surrounding cloud computing, software as a service, and web architectures in general. Here are some of the points that were made:

A general rule of building out any system that needs to scale is to look at every layer in your system as a caching opportunity to minimize processing.

Start with clusterable technologies wherever possible.

The cloud has made “spinning up” instances of your application just an API call away. It’s extremely flexible and basically means you’ll (almost) never have to think about hardware again.

Amazon AWS is the leading cloud solution right now and is extremely flexible because it provides access to the HTTP layer. It’s becoming the Wal-Mart of cloud solutions and it’s price-optimized for CPU cycles.

IBM could become a major player in cloud computing over the next 2-10 years because of their history of mainframe architecture. The cloud is [...]

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When you’re in the business of working with technology — in our case at Reflexions Data, building web applications — it’s easy to forget about your roots.

The culture of web development is rooted in a unique blend of other more forbidable cultural legacies: those of digital art, interface design, software development, and information architecture.

The web as an experimental intersection of art and technology was best represented in its early years by publications like Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. Editorials by technologists like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Nicholas Negroponte appeared alongside expositions on cyberpunk, digital art, and virtual reality. Experimental digital artists jostled with computer scientists, techno-utopians, and post-humanists in their attempts to express the shifting landscape of the late 20th century. These trends seemed so fundamental as to provoke Wired magazine in 1998 to predict a 20-year “long boom” that would result in worldwide “hyperwealth” and a new egalitarian golden age of cultural and technological achievement (only two years later Wired’s outlook would be somewhat less optimistic, the magazine itself having been sold off to Condé [...]

Building applications with reusable, modular components is kind of the holy grail of software development. To be conservative let’s call it a general aspiration, and if nothing else a guiding principle of Good Design. We’ve been hearing about it since the seventies and several iterations later (OO design, Java/Struts, and more recently, the growing number of web frameworks such as RoR, CakePHP, Zend, etc.) we’re just starting to feel the impact on large scale distributed applications that are becoming the hallmark of this strange collective trip that is the early 21st century landscape of social computing.

While we like to think of ourselves as a pretty savvy bunch, we at Reflexions have been admittedly a little slow in jumping on the framework bandwagon over the last few years. Maybe it’s the control-freak mindset that comes with building custom apps, or maybe we just haven’t found the right fit. Whatever the reason, we’ve finally started to embrace the framework philosophy by doing what any other group of control freaks would do: we’ve built our own. More on that in a future post.

What’s struck me about building a framework is that in doing so one engages in the zen-like exercise of modeling one’s own notions of how applications exist and interact with their underlying components. [...]

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that [...]

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Tuesday’s keynote was given by Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google, Chairman of Novell, etc, etc. There were two items of note: 1) the announcement by Schmidt that Google has just released a presentation application to their office suite, and 2) the fact that Schmidt’s appearance came on the heels of the announcement by Microsoft and AT&T that they will ask federal regulators to challenge Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for 3-odd billion dollars.

Incidentally, while booth size shouldn’t always be the measure of the relative importance of a company at a trade show, it was telling that Microsoft’s booth was in the “low rent” section and looked like the marketing department had paid for the trip by ransacking their couch for spare change (See the photo I snapped to the right. If you squint your eyes you can kind of make out the Microsoft booth among all of the people who are looking elsewhere). [...]

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This is a thought-provoking if somewhat pretentious video that was played as an introduction to the keynotes by Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos on Monday, April 16. I captured this on my Casio Exilim so apologies if it’s a little jumpy in spots: