Jon Udell: Web Development

Sam Ruby meditates on type metadata

"...meta data about arguments is often very helpful," Sam writes. "In statically typed languages, this data is most useful at design time. In dynamically typed languages, this information is useful at runtime. Either way, if you want to reliably get the results you want, you need to call the correct operation with the correct data types and provide information about those data types. That doesn't mean that some languages can't accept a wider range of operands. Or even that the recipient language cares about what data type the sender thinks it is sending."

Sam also recirculates the meme from Mark Pilgrim's "erudite reader" -- that two axes of typing, strong/weak and dynamic/static, are orthogonal. Python's interesting status in this regard may help to tease apart the issues that are currently polarizing the WSDL debate. It's not simply scripting languages versus compiled languages, I don't think.

Brewster Kahle explains the Internet Wayback Machine on the O'Reilly Network.

The Wayback Machine is a watershed, and it'll keep improving. But for the 1995-2001 period, sites that archived themselves weren't wasting their time. For example, Wayback doesn't remember Radio's July 2000 debut, but Radio does.

via boing boing, via evhead

Column | The Event-Driven Internet. In the web services paradigm, software speaks when spoken to. With publish/subscribe, software speaks when it has something to say.