Monday, November 27, 2006

Quartz Composer

For the last few days I have been experimenting with Apple's Quartz Composer. While this is primarily a motion-design tool (and a very powerful one indeed), it is also an example of a very effective graphical programming environment. Prior to this, I had seen such tools in the Windows environment and was less than impressed, but QC is really amazingly powerful; you can parse structures, use variables, loops, and everything somehow fits together very well. I see uses for this metaphor in the BPEL world, at the very least, but the whole world of distributed computing seems a good fit for it.


By the way, this is the 'code' behind one of the rather phenomenal demos that can be found here.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Web OS part II

To further illustrate the merging of Web, Database, and fileshare services, I'm currently involved in a Sharepoint installation process where data from users' file shares will be moved to the Sharepoint collaborative environment, with a SQL Server database as physical storage. Thus, the Internet replaces the file storage functionality, by delegating the actual storage to the SQL engine.