Global Warming reaches the 'net...

Now reading about those pesky FSF lawyers: Wow! This should be first DOA winter. The hibernation of Amber seems over.

For those who have not heard: read this.

I will continue adding small bits of code until the mess clears up. Just in case :-}

Amber's hibernation, DevRiot update

There are a couple of progress snapshots of DevRiot's new UI: precompiling code and related tasks. Although, sometimes is discouraging put too much effort on the UI since QA tools should generate tests automatically, data and plumbing work :-} but...

Amber is in hibernation, I do not know how deep. The Mono people started a direct implementation of Indigo/WCF. Amber's goal was to avoid the IP restriction imposed on WCF/Indigo but since there is an open-source version of them on its way...

Their work is part of Mono Olive, they seem to be cruising on that front. There is also a google group for Mono Olive.

Well that's all for now...

Stating the state of statelessness:

After further checking the Indigo book, the point I was confused about is clarified but the core problem remains: if the service type has a state, there will be a need for static methods to keep some kind of meaning (the lottery ticket example).

But if the object is stateless, the problem is not creating many instances of the same service type, but increase the throughput of the invocation of the exposed methods.

This may require several instances of the service type or just one. It will all depend on the behavior of the CLR and Reflection's api.

More on this and Austin later...

Who needs the NBA? + Amber Channels Interface..

Believe it or not, this was the attitude of several sport analysts after USA lost to Greece in the Basketball World Championships.

Yes, the USA does not seem to get its act together when it comes to put together a national team that is competitive but...

The tournament's MVP plays in the NBA, the current Olympic Gold medalists and last world champs have teams built around NBA players. None of them play for the USA team. The funny thing is that the NBA teams are making a killing by selling team related merchandising all over the world.

Anyways, Spain beat Greece thoroughly :-}

Amber: a series of new attributes and a channel interface are coming. The idea is to use the new attributes to tell the host/hosted service which channels are going to be required and need to be built.

Funny Architecture:

While trying to land a client, working on our technology and fidgeting with Amber (BTW is like a breath of .Net in a see of Java :-} I ran into the following paragraph (page 15 Pallmann's book):

"Instancing behavior determines how many instances of a service are created for clients (for example, one per client session)..."

which I find kind of funny. What about the object state? Say that service "A" gives access to or sells lottery tickets. How would one instance know which numbers are available?

Is Indigo going to force static members?

Or it is just intended to stateless classes? (my example is an over-simplification but before we know it stateful classes will be involved)

Anyways, I think it is their problem. I am just trying to avoid them:-}

Mimicking IIS

Some of the Indigo's features/facilities inside IIS described in Pallmann's book that have not been addressed yet are automatic activation and service health check-ups. As somebody asked early this week: the IP restrictions seem to reamain in place so...

The latter feature is the more complex one. What is the stick that should be used to determine the health of a service? Maybe a ratio of requests served to requests in queue and use an increasing time span to capture a meaningful figures?

Seems simple but easy to implement for a someday-will-be-beta proeject.

The automatic activation could be done from the intermediaries.

I am going back to our (not Amber's :-) beta...

Amber, Mass Autism?:

After figuring out a way to avoid using Reflection.Emit (although, it is really fun to generate code on the fly) the early versions of Amber's Hosting model has a couple of new features:

• "Hot" service upgrades. The idea is not new: allowing service providers to upgrade their services whitout interrupting the service.
• Reuse of AppDomains. As services come and go, the active, not currently hosting, AppDomains are stored in a "stash" so when the next service comes there is no need to create a new AppDomain (which are expensive to create, specially if there are other services already taxing the server

Well the fires in Galicia have turned into a European tragedy: France, Italy, and Portugal has sent crews.

The French Press reports that most of the fires are targeting potential second/summer home areas which can not be developed because of the forests. It is hard to argue against that after seeing the aerial pictures of some of the fires and their locations.

If I recall correctly one of the effects of autism is that autist people hit/hurt themselves in random bursts.

The summer fires, the Prestige, and other tidbits of Galician "sentidiño" seem like the bursts of an austist society. If that were possible. Not even after the loads of money from the EU, or a century of migrating to other places/cultures seem to help.

It is not that we are dummies. Zara/Inditex is from here, a former CEO of Continental Airlines is first generation Galician-American. There are plenty of examples like these two but as a collective, things are not so clear to me...

In addition Greenland is melting, Europe is baking, jellyfish is taking over the Mediterranean, so who needs intentional fires in one of the few green, forest-rich regions of Europe?

The regional government fires the crewmembers who "did not speak" galician in the spring. Who needs such a dumb leadership?

The opposition waits until the summer to do the "I told you so". Who needs such a dumb opposition?

Unbelievable...

I have been calling the volunteers number for 3 days straight (day and night) no success. The fotographer, that is my wife, asked me to wait. After the Katrina experience (we were in Austin at that time and most of the refugees went to TX) they really need help after the bru-ha-ha and newsworthyness is over.

Less people feel inclined to help then.

Static-o, Dumb and Dumber

I just managed to play around with the binding flags and managed to get around a problem that was forcing Amber's hosting model to emit code on the fly (or so I thought) I must have been tired or sleepy or both the times I tried to work around the problem in late November. Moral: do not attempt to write code while moving across the Atlantic...

Amber's hosting model may emit code for optimization purposes if required.

I have been blogging on & off last couple of months and slow with the beta. The sort of problems that take a lot of energy and one does not feel like talking about them often.

And I ran into Dumb weeks ago...

Dumb is this fellow from one of the net groups that takes a militant-not-too-particularly-open-or-smart attitude about issues. He chases you all-the-way from the forum to your personal address to disagree in-your-face.

This time the issue was XML. Somebody asked about how to solve a problem. I posted that XML could help them. I had used XML in similar situations with great success.

But Dumb thought that XML was a "just toy" which did not delivered on its promises.

I thought that was funny to hear from somebody that uses the web so often and intensely (html is after all xml). I politely replied that Eclipse, .Net, and w-s use XML so it should be more than "just a toy".

Wrong answer!! Dumb chased me for days off the forum with all sorts of senseless arguments. But the funny thing was: He was using a pseudonim. So I was being chased by Dumb and Dumber!! I had to run faster!!!

It is summer. And while the english and north-europeans invade the rest of Spain looking for sun and sand, a lot of spanish people flock to Galicia to cool off and enjoy the wild green coast.

But it is also the time of "wild fires". Just last weekend there were 26 fires, 85% of them were intentional. And the main ones were around cities or areas with resort potential.

It doesn't take a rocket scientists to figure out that most of these fires would benefit the people who can't develop their real estate projects because of the strict regulations around forests.

Galicia needs to create wealth, and employment.

The demographics are inverted: young, economically active people are still leaving (my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, and myself migrated, more than 100 years of migrating) just retirees or people near retirement stay.

But brick-and-mortar is not a long term solution. It does not create high-paying jobs which bring about bigger tax receipts. Destroying the nature that brings tourists and money does not seem smart either.

If I were one of the thousands and thousands of good people who came from all over to help Galicians deal with the "Prestige" spill, I would be thinking: why? is this people stupid?

Dynamic-o...

This will be a short posting to publish that Amber's Service Host has just learned how to dynamically generate and modify service assemblies. System.Reflection.Emit is fun to work with. I need to contact the rest of the team to get working on some interface design...

After HP bought (or agreed to buy) Mercury, Sun Microsystems seems a bit more eclipsed (pun intended)

Stateless, Clueless...

Amber: It seems to me that the stateless objects (only methods, no variables) are the best suited to be services. These types can expose their methods as services concurrently without further protection. Of course there are special situations but the core principle can take one far...

Clueless:

While the longest, democratically elected, serving comunist government (in India) relaxes workers' striking rights so its state does not lose on the economic boom. Iberia's pilots union demands from the company secure jobs and salaries until retirement, and strikes at the start of the summer season.

Iberia is the oldest and biggest spanish airline. It used to be state-owned. From those days come this high-priviledges, exclusive union. It is better described as a club where you get in by blood linage. Just like a monarchy.

Their argument is that Iberia is setting up a low cost airline to compete, or survive for that matter. They are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs and/or priviledges. And they have to work on week-ends and holidays.

Needless to say, not even one union is backing them up, and I am driving my wife to Madrid to fly US Airways to Philadelphia.

Who wants to fly with Fred Flintstone?

To Emit Or Not To Emit:

One of the things that Microsoft's Indigo (Beta 1) allows service providers ("providers") is to expose as a service any method (even private ones)

This poses the following questions: how to reach a private method after it has been compiled?

The problem is compounded by the fact that Amber's Host ("the host") needs to use an Appdomain per type exposed as a service (which requires MarshalByRefObject) to protect providers from tripping each other.

By the time the new Appdomain is up, the object invoking the host, is not longer type "A" but MarshalByRefObject.

A direct use of reflection does not seem to be working. So far these are the following options that I have researched to solve the problem:

*) Use System.Convert.ChangeType. It may require the providers to implement complex interfaces. We may want to avoid this.

*) Use a double shot of reflection: one for dissecting MarshalByRefObject and the other to dissect the provider's type.

*) Use System.Reflection.Emit and modify the provider on the fly. Risky?

The easiest solution would be to forget reusing the instance implementing IService, the one invoking the host, this would eliminate a lot of trouble but it may be too expensive in some cases.

I will update you guys as soon as I have something working...

Amber Host:

After several interactions over email with the other Amber developers and managing to get some time off my transatlantic move chores, I am working on the host.

Some of the features are so far:

*) Per service AppDomain setup and security evidence: each type will have the opportunity of passing to Amber the setup and security evidence that has outside it.

*) Leases: it will be up to the service provider to tell the host if it wants to remain inside the host. This way hosts do not suffer from "dead" services.

*) Public/Private exception handling: as in any other piece of software a service user should expect a method to throw exceptions. The service provider may want to keep some exceptions outside the public's eyes. Public/Private exception handling will help in that regard.

*) Multithreaded services: say that user "a" is accessing service "b", method "c" and user"d" is accessing service "b", method "e". If the costs of thread bookkeeping are not excessive, the host could expose both methods in different threads (well, this is a big ?)

Red Tape Follies:

1) What do you do when official agency "A" tells you to call official agency "B" because they are to handle the issue. You call official agency "B", but official agency "B" tells you to call official agency "A"?

2) Official agency "C" gives you a form that may or may not work with official agency "D" but if it does not work please update them to make the form more usable but not official!?!?