"Lately I've been thinking a lot about the impact of the move to a thick client architecture for web applications, and I'm becoming more and more certain that this means that Rails-style MVC frameworks on the server-side are going to end up being phased out in favour of leaner and meaner frameworks that better address the new needs of thick-client architecture."

Faye is an easy-to-use publish-subscribe messaging system based on the Bayeux protocol. It provides message servers for Node.js and Rack, and clients for use in Node and Ruby programs and in the browser.

"For instance, there is the Rogue Factory unit producing "custom high-tech goods"—but "what would the black market of 'special orders' look like?" Benque asks. This "black market of 'special orders'" for things like 3D-printed human organs would also be something quite extraordinary to see, given another two decades' time and cheap-enough bio-ink."

"As Alexander repeatedly points out, you can’t consider a construction in isolation, you have to consider the construction in context. And the context for this bench is rather remarkable: you have rather steep hills covered with trees behind you and to your right, you have the Fort Mason buildings to your left, and in front of you you have a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay, with Alcatraz and Angel Island in the distance."

"Explaining Redis is tough, it’s easy to say “a data structures server” or “memcached on steroids” or something more jargon filled. It’s not exactly a key value store, it’s definitely not a relational or document-oriented database. The biggest selling point of Redis is that usually as programmers we have to bend our data into a table or document to save it, but with Redis we can persist data as we conceptually visualize it. Tasty!"

"Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. With its embedded Ruby application programming interface (API), you can extend and customize the program to suit your needs. If you love SketchUp but ever thought "I just wish it did XYZ," then there's a good chance the Ruby API can make it happen. "

"Every project I’ve worked on in the last two years has heavily involved the use of web APIs. Libersy at the time (no idea about now) had an architecture that was extensively API based, even for communication between internal applications (an architecture I strongly argued against, bee tea dubs). Since then I’ve futzed with web APIs almost exclusively. From very narrow focused uses like University of Michigan’s Bluestream Service, to more broad but still fairly local APIs like the Ann Arbor District Library’s soon-to-be-updated API, all the way to APIs of major web applications like Twitter and Flickr.

Constant exposure has turned me into a bit of a snob: I can’t stand working with a poorly designed API! If you’re about to design or release an API for the web and want to avoid the ire of your developers, I’ve summed up the best (and worst) of what I’ve seen into 8 rules:"

"Write performance in Cassandra is excellent. The internals are specifically geared towards a heavy-write system. It writes to a memory table and a serial commit log, and every so often the memory table is flushed to disk in what the Big Table paper describes as a sorted strings table, often called an SSTable — an immutable data structure. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes, but the performance characteristics are clear: there is nothing slow in the write path. The Cassandra wiki page on Architecture Internals provides more details."

"The climate of the city is altered, in other words, literally from the ground up; using the functional equivalent of terrestrially powered ovens, otherwise botanically impossible species can healthily take root.

This domestication of geothermal energy, and the use of it for purposes other than electricity-generation, raises the fascinating possibility that heat itself, if carefully and specifically redirected, can utterly transform urban space. "

"This looks a whole lot like the initializer block in Rails 2.3, but the Application object, not a global configuration object, now has the configuration information. Similarly, routes.rb now begins YourApp::Application.routes.draw. The application object lives in the center of Railties in Rails 3, providing a core object that the rest of the frameworks can build on."

"But what if we could do this with a glass tower in midtown Manhattan? Or if there was an elevator moving upward through an all-glass shaft, and as the lights in the lobby around it switch on and off, different—and often wildly unexpected—shadows are cast?"

"Yesterday we analyzed some of the applications being built with Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we're exploring Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series...."

"The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”"

"Orchestra provides an instrumentation API for Ruby."

"Section Eight Design was selected as the winner for their partnership with Teton Valley Community School, a non-profit, independent school in Victor, Idaho. The proposal, pictured above, focuses on scalability and a connection to the outdoors, taking advantage of the school's location at the base of the Teton Mountain Range. In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces that the school will build incrementally as they raise funds, gardens, farm animals, and local, drought-resistant flora will be integrated into the school's fabric to promote community, environmental responsibility and a "sense of place.""

"As the speed of technological progress continues to accelerate, innovation threatens to outpace architects’ and designers’ working knowledge of materials thereby limiting their applicability. In order to stay at the cutting edge of design, a knowledge of the uses, properties, and sources of new materials is essential. A companion to the Transmaterial books written by Blaine Brownell and published by Princeton Architectural Press, Transmaterial online is intended to be a clear, concise, accessible, and carefully edited resource that provides information about the latest and most intriguing materials commercially available."

"The proposition of the paper is that a direct relation held between the spatial shape of the church, its dedication and the cultural and political situation in the region. These churches inspire further studies of the use of the equilateral triangle plan in architecture, particularly for sacred buildings. In the future such studies should result in a more complete review and perhaps a full catalogue of buildings established on such a plan."

"Let your feet experience some real relief with these truly interlocking, tessellated concrete pavers. Each paver is part of a one piece puzzle.
Make your own with a quality polyurethane mold. No prior experience is necessary. Each mold comes complete with instructions on casting, coloring, curing, and installation."

"In order for buildings, especially multi-family apartment buildings to be truly bright green they must be within the reach of average people. But how?

To investigate this question and other issues surrounding green building and design, "deep green" professionals met at the third annual Living Future unconference in Portland, Ore., last week. On the first day, attendees had the opportunity to visit three of Portland's best examples of affordable, green buildings: Central City Concern's Richard Harris Building, Reach Community Development's Station Place Tower and the Turtle Island Development LLC's Sitka Apartments."

"Recently, a lot of new non-relational databases have cropped up both inside and outside the cloud. One key message this sends is, "if you want vast, on-demand scalability, you need a non-relational database".

If that is true, then is this a sign that the once mighty relational database finally has a chink in its armor? Is this a sign that relational databases have had their day and will decline over time? In this post, we'll look at the current trend of moving away from relational databases in certain situations and what this means for the future of the relational database."

"php is the "language of choice" for the majority of web development, and it can be described as "The Visual Basic of Free Software" for very good reasons. Visual Basic gets a poor rap, because it is so easy to write bad code with. It takes years to become properly familiar with and proficient in Visual Basic, and php is no different. By the time a developer is familiar with php's rich and wonderful methods for self-mutilation, their lives have become so degraded that they wish they had never become programmers."

via http://growabrain.typepad.com

Someday we'll build our studio this way.

We seem to be nudging towards SOA

Surely somebody I know owns photographs of the old swimming pool at the Santa Fe Institute. Maybe me, even. I'll have to check.

"Basically, if you strip away the ghouls and enchanted magikal attacks, it's a game about ... architecture."

"The idea that the correct functional, the correct structural and the best possible aesthetic solutions are one and the same thing must, I am afraid, be abandoned..."