Insights Delimited By Time

Though its been a couple of days since the award was announced I did not come across a lot of mention of this year’s ACM Turning Award in the blogsphere except on Mark Little’s blog.

This year’s Turing Award (the equivalent of the Noble Prize in computing) has gone to Barbara Liskov for her contributions to programming. Prof. Liskov was also the first US woman to be awarded a PhD in computing.

Also thanks to Mark, I got hold of a copy of Prof. Liskov’s paper on Argus - a programming language and system that was developed to support the implementation and execution of distributed programs.

This year is already turning out to be very exciting given that we are seeing people, especially those from a Distributed Systems background being honored.

Finally an authoritative work on Cloud Computing from UC Berkley’s RAD Labs. It is quite likely that in the time to come other works on cloud computing will end up citing this paper a lot!

Also watch the quick 15 minute video.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about REST at SOA India 2008. It was nice to see some attendees already familiar with REST mostly because they were consumers of Amazon S3 but were curious to know the details. The talk went well and today I received some requests for the slides. So here is Integrating RESTfully. I intentionally skipped most other constraints of REST and limited myself to the Client Server and Uniform Interface. In retrospect I think it was a good decision as a) the other concepts are fairly well understood and b) with all the arguments and questions Uniform interface ended up taking most of the time.