Continuations

I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because he wanted to make sure they could bring the conference back to Portland! There already are some interesting startups based here, such as JanRain and Jive, which just announced a $30 million funding round, and the city is clearly attracti...

Middleware seems like a dinosaur concept from enterprise client-server computing. On the web, everything is open and anybody can connect to a service, so who would need Middleware? Damn it, the whole Internet is Middleware! Not so fast. Let’s revisit some of the enterprise issues that Middleware helps to address: scalability and flexibility. The root of these tend to be the N*M problem and the bottleneck problem. If you have N servers and M clients that all need to talk to each other you wind...