The last day of the conference ended with panel on the future of Middleware R&D. I was surprised to see how much of my presentation on the need for better tools and programming models was reflected in the statements by the other panelists. I have been making the case for some time now that developers who have to use middleware have great difficulty combining the various tools to get their job done and that instead of embarking on developing some new technology for big problems such as massive scalability, R&D should put more effort in making sure that established technologies (e.g. caching), become more usable in day-to-day programming. I strongly believe that reliability of systems can be greatly improved with better programming and development tools. In the same context is my other point that we should build better support technologies for systems that are capable of handling failures, continuous perturbations and malicious users.
There was interesting discussion about how to measure these kinds improvements in development support and to create feedback cycles to understand that R&D is indeed improving the usability of middleware systems
Posted by Werner Vogels at June 25, 2003 09:42 AMHi Prof.
Is your presentation on Middleware's panel available? It was very interesting and I'd like
to see it again.
Lásaro.
Posted by: Lásaro Jonas on July 1, 2003 04:35 PMMe too...
particularly those pictures about "The developer's life..."
How it is... and How it should be...
