Comments on: Continuing our discussions & a suggested topic

By: Raymond Yee

Raymond Yee — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:26:39 +0000

Douglas, I agree that it’s useful to make sure the right kind of conversation is happening. I’m very curious to hear from anybody who has participated in one of the Bamboo workshops (THATCampers?). Thanks, also for the link to Jim Michalko’s post.

By: Douglas Knox

Douglas Knox — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:03:47 +0000

From what I have read, it seems that the greatest strength of Bamboo in the early phases is less a specific architectural vision or approach than a commitment to bringing together a range of participants to make sure the right kind of conversation happens. I agree that it's important to ask how Bamboo will learn from and participate in the open web, which already can affect scholarship even if it doesn't support everything scholars might want. Jim Michalko, VP of RLG Programs Development at OCLC, just wrote a blog post that seems relevant here. He's thinking about how heavyweight library data standards have sometimes "diminished the library's impact in the web world."

By: Raymond Yee

Raymond Yee — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:03:55 +0000

It’ll be interesting to see what Sorin Matei has in mind specifically when he releases a draft proposed architecture.

I’d like to know how the message of “Guerilla SOA’ is received.

At any rate, it would be good to think of some concrete examples to ground our thinking. Sean, what problems are you working on that might be interesting to discuss here?

By: Sean Gillies

Sean Gillies — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:06:15 +0000

And of course I forgot to mention that serendipity, which we cherish, is a natural property of the Web. It is probably not a natural property of all architectures (according to Roy Fielding, serendipity emerges from the Web’s REST constraints.)

I hope I didn’t mistakenly attribute an interest in Facebook type platforms to Matei.

By: Raymond Yee

Raymond Yee — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:18:27 +0000

My blog post on Sorin Matei’s post:

blog.dataunbound.com/2008/06/11/sorin-matei-on-project-bamboo-and-the-role-of-mashups/

Sean, I agree that a large Facebook/MySpace type of platform wouldn’t be a great thing for the Bamboo project to propose or to try to build.

Thanks for the reference to “Guerilla SOA” — I’ll take a look.

By: Sean Gillies

Sean Gillies — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:22:03 +0000

I must say I’m -1 on building single large (and expensive) Facebook or MySpace type platforms for the digital humanities, slightly less negative about scholarly Facebook apps (if scholars want to use Facebook itself, why not?), and far more in favor of the Web as the platform. The Web is messy, sure, but Matei fails to acknowledge its great strengths: it scales, it has very low barriers to entry, it lets applications be deployed and evolve independently of one another. It even has a theoretical basis (REST).

Speaking of SOA, I get a little nervous when that term appears because it often implies grand designs with a lot of risk. I hope that Bamboo architects are following the discussion around “Guerilla SOA”. Good (somewhat unserious here and there) presentation on it at

www.infoq.com/presentations/soa-without-esb

Martin Fowler and Jim Webber make an analogy from agile development to the Web/REST/Guerilla SOA as a basis for agile deployment and system buildout.