Even though I am not a Hadoop team member or committer, I do spend good amount of time visiting companies evangelizing Hadoop, and of course, Cascading. But my message is not about how fast Hadoop applications run, that would be missing the point of Hadoop almost entirely.
"Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world as remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions." -- E.B. White. "Coon Tree". 1956
I'm currently working through a handful of requirements that will close the feature gap between an older content management system and a newer one. Both have been developed in-house. The first being MS based and is loosely a content management system, the second Java/XML/XSL based, and really a content management system. One thing I'm fighting is keeping the old process wrapped around the old system from leaking and staining the new system.
Poincare made a statement about mathematics that strikes me as true for computer science. To paraphrase:
Mathematics must always move in two directions, that of critical self-reflection and towards the study of nature. The Hilbert Challenge
I was out at a large computer manufacturer this week, north of Austin, interviewing some of their executive staff on process. It is well known that this company measures everything, and all their decisions are based on those measurements. And that their BPI process (a variant on Six Sigma) creates a virtuous circle of leadership creating new leadership, who are empowered to continuously make improvements.
More movement in the world of BPM. Fuego follows Plumtree into the BEA stable. Note that Plumtree has OEMed Fuego for some time now, so integration into their portal exists, to some degree. Now let's see if BEA improves upon the Fuego support for SOAP and XML and doesn't diminish the robustness of their support organization. The press release.
I don't think I can stress enough the utility of having a staging environment that you can clone the relevant bits of and then surgically implant into an ailing production system.
One of the most powerful tools available in managing change and complexity is by sandboxing applications. This is simply achieved by reducing the number of external dependencies to an applications runtime environment, creating the most natural level of isolation as possible.
Not exactly sure why, but I'll be on a panel Wednesday, October 19th, at the BPX2005 conference in San Diego speaking on BPM. More interestingly, there is an overlapping SOA conference I'll be attending.
