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Thinking About Moore's Law  
# Friday, January 30, 2004
 
Everybody understands Moore's Law, right? As it's commonly stated today, the law says that the amount of processing power available for a given amount of money doubles every 18 months. It's simple.

Except that it's not simple. Human beings didn't evolve to truly understand this kind of exponential growth, as there aren't many examples of it in the natural world. My favorite way of expressing Moore's Law, one that I think better captures the extraordinary impact this rate of change implies, is the realization that we'll make as much progress in processor speed in the next year and a half as we've made in the entire history of computing to date. Who can predict the effect of this level of change? Answer: nobody.

Another more fundamental problem with understanding Moore's Law is the name. Gordon Moore's prescient observation is not in fact a law at all. A law describes some immutable aspect of the physical world. F=MA, Newton's second law of motion, is a bona fide law. Moore's Law, however, is actually a prediction rather than a law. It's not even a prediction about the physical world in any concrete sense. Instead, Moore's Law is an expression of faith in the ongoing creativity of chip designers.

Nothing has had a bigger impact on our world in the last 40 years than the reality of Moore's Law, and I sincerely hope that it continues to hold. I just wish it had a more accurate name.

Still, I'd be the first to admit that "Moore's Prediction" just doesn't have the same ring.

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Understanding BizTalk Server 2004  
# Friday, January 16, 2004
 
It would be nice if we could wake up some morning to find that every application in the world now understands web services. Since this isn’t going to happen, we’re going to need technologies that let us access diverse applications in more traditional ways for some time to come. And although they’ve been customarily viewed as part of EAI, these products have been morphing into platforms for business process management as the value of BPM has become evident. Anybody who's interested in web services, service-oriented architecture, or BPM should certainly know something about this class of products.

Microsoft’s entry in this space is BizTalk Server. I’ve written a white paper that gives an architectural overview of the forthcoming version, BizTalk Server 2004, in about 20 pages. Sponsored by the BizTalk people in Redmond, the paper is available in a couple of different formats. The best one, a zipped Word document that’s a little under 2 megabytes, is here.

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Patents, Attributes, and Indigo  
# Monday, January 12, 2004
 
Software patents are at best a mixed blessing, but they’re nevertheless a reality. Last year, just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft was granted US patent #6,654,953, Extending program languages with source-program attribute tags. The patent covers the idea of embedding attributes in programming languages to easily provide applications with extra services.

Attributes are a cool idea, one with built-in support in the .NET Framework’s CLR. They’re also used extensively in Microsoft’s forthcoming Indigo technology. For instance, the basic skeleton of an Indigo class might look something like this:


using System.ServiceModel;

[Service]
[Security(ConfidentialitySupport=true)]
public class Example
{

    [ServiceMethod]
    public int Method1(int x) { . . . }

    [ServiceMethod]
    [TransactionOperation]
    public int Method2(int x) { . . . }

}


In this example, everything inside square brackets is an attribute. Some of them, such as Service and ServiceMethod, indicate that this class and its methods can be accessed via Indigo. Others, such as the Security and TransactionOperation attributes, cause extra services to be provided (in this case, confidentiality through encrypted communication and an atomic transaction, respectively). By relying on attributes, Indigo makes adding complex services relatively simple.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the Java world responds to Indigo. Will this new patent mean that using attributes is no longer an option for Java’s owners or for anybody else outside the Windows universe? It’s hard to know, as Microsoft seems to have largely adopted the common industry practice of acquiring patents for defensive reasons rather than to prevent competitors from using ideas. Still, that the patent exists at all might give pause to anybody planning to incorporate this style of attribute into a future design.

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On The Two David Chappells Problem  
# Thursday, January 08, 2004
 
What’s the probability of two people, both speakers and writers working in the same technology area, having the exact same name? If that name is “David Chappell”, the probability is exactly 1: it’s already happened.

The “other” David Chappell is Vice President and Chief Technology Evangelist for Sonic Software, a maker of integration software headquartered in the Boston area. Like me, Dave writes books—he’s co-author of Java Message Service (with my good friend Richard Monson-Haefel) and Java Web Services—and he speaks at various conferences. We’ve even spoken at the same event once or twice. Dave is a good guy, interesting to talk with and well worth listening to, and he’s also commented on our naming collision.

Here are some tips for telling us apart:
- Dave works more in the Java world, I work more in the .NET world.
- Dave lives on the East Coast, I live on the West Coast.
- Dave sometimes uses his middle initial ‘A’, while I never use a middle initial.
- People rarely call me “Dave”.

Dave and I have talked about writing a book together sometime. A friend of mine advised me to go ahead and do it, as long as I make sure my name appears first.

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