Qcon London 2007

So, it’s a week since attending QCon and with seven days to reflect on everything, what were the main things I took away from the conference?

Probably the clearest impression left on my mind was the conviction that web development is changing, and changing very quickly. State, Rich functionality and some business model are moving to the client and server side components are becoming data servers. The model is evolving towards the old client server one. What technology will dominate here is presently unclear, but eventually there will be a few big winners, and given there are currently around 500 Ajax frameworks about, a lot of losers.

Other nuggets of gold:

• If you can’t feed a software development team with 2 pizzas, then it’s too big! (Amazon.com)
• 2 Phase Commit is a barrier to availability, having a relational database can be a barrier to scaleability.
• RPC is not scaleable
• Transactions in highly available systems need to be more BASE than ACID
• Ebay has no application code transactions.
• M&S.com, NBA and host of other websites all actually run on the Amazon.com platform.
• Don’t make any decision until it’s the right time to make it: The last responsible moment.
• Concentrate on keeping your domain model clean and up to date is the best policy.
• Automate your testing
• Try and make all your decisions reversible, and thus get rid of “architecture”