McGrath Musings

September 22, 2004 —

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MCGRATH: Tightly integrated? Just say no

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To most business people, 'integration' means process integration. That is, some applications are tightly integrated if they work as one to perform some business function. It is a very unfortunate fact of life that the quickest and cheapest way to get started with process integration is by means of spot-welding systems together. This so called point-to-point integration accounts for most of the world's "tight integration" code developed by system integrators.

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Big Ball of Mud

MCGRATH: Von Neumann's curse

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Ever since Jon Von Neumann's brilliant insights into general purpose processing machines, we have been building mental models of processing around the idea of a single, all powerful CPU. The so-called Von Neumann architecture is endemic in the way we think about systems. Here's why.

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Von Neumann architecture

Global Grid Forum

Parallel computing: Comparing different domain decomposition techniques

MCGRATH: Manuals, conversations and RSS

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Are you ever surprised to see how big a role weblogs and RSS plays in your software debugging efforts?
I am. Pretty soon, I predict we will be asking the question "How did we every debug software without access to weblogs and RSS feeds?"

PLUS: More Sean McGrath

•Tightly integrated? Just say no

•Realities of electronic information management

•In Praise of IT Multilingualism

•Moving mountains with tweezers

Sean McGrath is CTO of Propylon. He is an internationally acknowledged authority on XML and related standards. He served as an invited expert to the W3C's Expert Group that defined XML in 1998. He is the author of three books on markup languages published by Prentice Hall. Visit his site.

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