Bob's blog

RESTful Drafting

I had a great bicycle ride today, even better since I thought it was going to rain all day. It fixed a bad case of spring fever that started a few months ago, when I wanted to take this ride but just haven't had the time or weather to take a 40 mile ride. If you've only seen the New Jersey Turnpke, you've missed a lot of beautiful areas in the state. One of my favorite routes is through the Watchung Circle because there's little traffic and nice rolling hills, mostly rolling until you have to climb over the ridge of the Second Watchung Mountain to head back home. I was driving through with a friend from Colorado and told him about riding over the crest, but he was having a hard time considering that a mountain. Nevertheless, the Watchung Mountains did serve their purposes and shielding General Washington during the Revolutionary War. That's the other part of New Jersey, Washington slept everywhere around here.

Somewhere in the middle of the ride, I found a nice headwind and thought it was awfully early in the season to be battling the wind without friends. I wasn't with my usual group today where we would've formed a paceline to help draft against the wind. It's a loosely coupled group with some structure and functions for moving in the paceline. For some reason, that got me thinking about web sites and RESTful applications. Which in turn, got me thinking web architectures and loosely coupled designs. I've been having more discussions lately about modular, flexible architecture choices.

The beauty of Web infrastructure today is that there are lots of choices. There are choices in development languages, choices in deployment platforms, even choices in open source databases and filesystems. I've had a lot of discussions lately about choosing the right development language and how to build an interesting web site (by the way, the interesting part is up to you). The good systems engineering answer is always a resounding "It depends", but we can have a good conversation along the way. What's different now is that there doesn't have to be a singular choice, you can pick the best of all worlds. If you want to use Ruby for flexibility on the front-end servers - great. If you want to use Java for scalability in the mid-tier - terrific. A flexible platform for user interactions can be driven by flexible choices for building it.

This may not seem like the best thinking for a good bike ride, but it worked for me today. Tomorrow I'm going for a mountain bike ride. Let's see what the mud makes me think about.

Posted at 10:53PM May 17, 2008 by bs in Cycling  |