In short, I do believe that Spring framework forced you for a long time to use a subset of Java, a subset of frameworks you use, and has been implicitly very intrusive on all the frameworks that support it. It constrains innovation and limit choices. And more!
Tony Hoare, Inventor of QuickSort, Turing Award Winner
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. In recent years, a number of program analysers like PREfix and PREfast in Microsoft have been used to check references, and give warnings if there is a risk they may be non-null. More recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in 1965.
@QCon SF, I attended a presentation of Erik Meijer in which he talked about research projects he is involved in, including the Volta project. He talked about an interesting problem that is ignored when we talk about Ajax application and especially when we talk about solutions like GWT that make you feel home while programming for the web. In such an experience, and before splitting your application and deploying it on the web, you feel quite secured. Anyway, often, it is not so important to look for securing inner computer guts communication when there is no network involved. Evil shows up when it is time to go live, to the clouds. There you are not communicating through inner channels but rather through public Internet network.
Given the growing interest in Domain Specific Languages, Michael Feathers provides some reflections on external DSLs, their advantages and pitfalls as well as possible success and failure factors that he believes to be function of far more than the technology.
Posts I find interestingPowered by WordPress