Rourke McNamara

Yogurt smoothies can have a pretty wide range of flavor and consistency. The yogurt is always the same, so the variety comes from the fruit and the liquids. The liquid is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be; there’s a huge variety of flavors you can buy as a juice or a nectar but can’t easily find as fresh or frozen fruit. Adding only a small amount of such a liquid to a smoothie can enhance the flavor considerably without impacting the texture. After all, you want to drink your smoothie and not eat it with a spoon, right?

People have been using the term ESB — short for Enterprise Service Bus — for quite a few years now. Despite that, there continues to be enormous confusion over what the term means. This confusion stems from the fact that people have overloaded the term ESB and are using it to mean two different things. When people talk about ESBs, they are either talking about ESB products (ESBp) or ESB implementations (ESBi). No one can sell you an ESB implementation, just as no one can sell you an SOA. However, you can and should buy products that help to implement this design pattern.

A friend of Jen’s showed me this page, which lists the ten most expensive chocolates in the world. Jen has … good taste in chocolate, so I was familiar with some of the companies listed towards the bottom of the page. I was amused and alarmed to see that there are people selling chocolates for $250 a piece ($2,600 a pound). Even more surprising, the company is based in Norwalk, Connecticut.

What sort of chocolate will people pay $250 for?

David Linthicum recently wrote a great piece on designing for performance in SOA-based development environments. It’s good to see an influential SOA blogger talking about performance; there’s far too little talk about performance among analysts and thought leader. Performance and scalability are extremely important, and if you don’t consider them from the beginning and design for performance you will pay for it later.

In traditional application development, architects could get away with ignoring performance concerns when the application in question had very minor load and latency requirements. In the world of SOA this isn’t an option. The service you write today for a low load application will be re-used tomorrow in a high load environment.

TIBCO Software Inc’s ActiveMatrix product launched the first week of December. In the intervening two weeks there has been quite a bit written about this new product. What follows is a quick overview of what people are saying about ActiveMatrix and service virtualization.

Smugmug is currently beta testing the latest version of their photo gallery interface. After playing around on the beta server a little, I’m cautiously optimistic. There are some features that are almost a huge improvement, and some that are a nice step up, and one downsides to the new interface. As is, the new interface is a nice incremental improvement. With a few tweaks it has the potential to be a really impressive step forward.