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I am happy when I am not the only one with bad experience with virtual machines.

I like a lot stuff like Xen virtual machines but…sometimes they did not soleve problems, they generate them!

[...] While I was looking for hosting, I heard a couple of recurring questions from users and potential hosting companies:

Why not go with Linode/AWS/[other virtualized hosting]?

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This is the second article on functional programming. In the first one we talked about scala and the type inference system it brings in the Java Way of Life.

I played a bit with python functional howto, building a small game. Before starting I surfing for a bit of libraries and documentation.

We talked about ”Web applIcation Service Provider” (WISP) in the past days. So what are the specification for a Service Provder wanting to be a WISP?

Let’try to sketch them together:

WISP Hypothesis

• A WISP must offer a set of XML-RPC API (WISP API) to configure the services. They must be simpler than SOAP, and must support at least two languages picked from  Python,Ruby,Java,PHP, Perl.
• WISP API should be provided always in SSL way.
• WISP API specification will be provided on subsequent articles
• WISP must provide a minimal set of LAMP applications, like WebMail, CMS (i.e. Wordpress). Also WISP must provide at least one "dashboard" web interface to set up a dashboard for the WISP API
• For simplicity, the web application are deployed as  two tiered: database tier and web tier. Anyway you can build complex system connecting a lot of 2-tier application
• On the database tier, WISP must give at least one Relational Database (like MySQL or PostgresSQL) and one NoSQL solution, altrought NoSQL forest is a bit tricky.
• About email, at least an IMAP server and SMTP server must be provided
• It should be possible to define "logical user" to segregate email mailboxes and web application
• The amount of RAM allowed to be consumed by application should be considered only on the application tier. Database and webmail will be offered on a "best effort" base, with clear defined limits. For special needs, a "private" database instance could be installed
• The Service Level Agreement (SLA) should be at least 99.99%
• WISP has the freedom to choose the underling Operating System. By the way, the web application should try to be agnostic (even if Linux is always the first choice for a LAMP stack)
• WISP must provide bandwidth and disk space in a very cheap way. For this reason, the "usage meter" should be easy to compute and very liberal on disk space, while very strong on single application memory usage

Archimedes (287 BC) said “give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Apple, after decades of lack of decent garbage collection to Objective-C, seems to say “I will give an ARC to exit to the dark hand-made memory allocation”.

Let’see how.

As you know, we at Gioorgi are not so Cloud-Computing enthusiastic.

Anyway, we watch every buzz-word, every good idea also if it born in an evil empire :) Cloud computing is SOA and huge. As software architect, Cloud computing is doomed to fail for some simple reasons:

At Gioorgi.com we are not a true cloud fan, and reality is going on to collect proofs for us…

On June 20, 2011, Dropbox had a serious security bug. It was possible to login to an account with “a wrong password”. Like to say Dropbox account system was naked, because “a small number of users[…] could have logged into an account without the correct password”!

F# is a Microsoft research Language. F# is riding the functional revenge way of the last years. F# is a mixed approach, because some variables can be modified. It borrows a lot of things from Haskell and OCaml  (Wikipedia dixit). F# is not used like Erlang or Haskell but it could be installed with Visual Studio 2010, and as a separate visual studio plug-in. If you need some functional stuff on your .NET architecture,  F# can be your friend.

LINQBridge is a re-implementation of all the standard query operators in Framework 3.5's System.Linq.Enumerable class. It's designed to work with the C# 3.0 compiler, as used by Visual Studio 2008. LINQBridge comprises a LINQ to Objects API for running local queries. (It doesn't include an implementation of LINQ to SQL, nor LINQ to XML; a good compromise can be to force Framework 3.5 out to just the server machines, allowing LINQ to SQL to be used where it's needed most).

There are a lot of legacy project out of there. Some customer will ask you to add a simple .NET 2.0 web service to a big application, and they will not switch to C# 3.5 for that.