I’ll be speaking at Gluecon in Denver on May 25/26. The conference looks fantastic and there are lots of people going that I’m looking forward to catching up with. My talk (Thu May 26, 9:30am) is titled Evolution of inter-application data protocols via shared writable storage, with the following rather wordy abstract:
Cloud storage offers a variety of potential advantages: greater capacity, ease of scaling, lower cost of ownership, fewer operations staff, less hardware build-out, reduced responsibility for backups, etc. These are all straightforward and in a sense linear changes. There is another advantage though that is more interesting: the inherent value created when applications use shared storage. Shared storage holds the potential for unanticipated valuable operations, including search and mash-ups, that go beyond the linear value of isolated per-application storage. Shared storage also allows asynchronous inter-application communication based on data protocols that emphasize emergent agreed conventions rather than a priori rules. This is a sharp departure from inter-application communication via pre-specified synchronous remote procedure calls. In this talk I will elaborate on this point of view, with examples from evolutionary systems and discussion of Fluidinfo. I’ll argue that shared writable storage is the real promise of cloud storage, and show how it offers an approach to a class of problems which includes Tim O’Reilly’s oft-asked question “Where is the Web 2.0 address book?”
For a simpler description of what I mean by all this, read the pair of articles on the O’Reilly Radar site: Dancing out of time: Thoughts on asynchronous communication and Getting closer to the Web 2.0 address book. If you’re going to Gluecon, please say hi! If you’re not going and you’d like to, you can register here and use the discount code spkr12 to get 15% off.