

Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing – Tech Talk - GarethX
http://blog.fogcreek.com/eight-fallacies-of-distributed-computing-tech-talk/

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patrickmay
The Eight Fallacies were the impetus for the development of Jini and
JavaSpaces. I wrote about this many moons ago here:
[http://www.softwarematters.org/jini-
intro.html](http://www.softwarematters.org/jini-intro.html)

Jini is one of those technologies that should have taken off but somehow
didn't. At the time, the Jini proponents attributed the failure to the fact
that J2EE sold more hardware. That might have been a factor, but I suspect the
fact that Jini was just too much outside the mainstream was a bigger issue.
Not unlike Lisp, really.

~~~
rdtsc
I would imagine being tied to Java at least by name (JavaSpace, Jini) is an
impetus to push others away from it.

That is why a "Soup of REST-ful services" is becoming the lowest common
denominator for distributed architectures (I think the buzzword I am supposed
to use is "micro-services"). Because it is not tied to a language or platform.

Speaking of Sun's distributed systems, anyone remember JXTA? Looked really fun
on paper, peer-to-peer overlay networks, send messages to anyone anywhere,
works just "like pipes". Anyone ever used that? I learned about it school at
one point during a project.

~~~
patrickmay
REST is great for decoupling but as generally implemented it adds too much
latency for some types of distributed computing. It also makes distributed
transactions difficult to manage.

Jimi addressed a lot of those problems in a technically interesting way. The
protocol itself is language agnostic, but the implementation took advantage of
Java's mobile code capabilities.

~~~
rdtsc
> It also makes distributed transactions difficult to manage.

Wonder if the typical REST-ful answer would be to make yet another service on
top that manages distributed transactions and talks to a variety of other
services. Sort of like APIs wrapping another APIs which wrap other APIs...

------
rdtsc
Also on a funny note, but related:

[http://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem-
checklist.html](http://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem-checklist.html)

