Rinat Abdullin

It is interesting, how concepts of separated features and messaging become more important as the distributed applications evolve. I keep encountering these again and again in the solutions at Lokad and in new reads showing up:

• Articles about cloud computing;
• Effectus codebase by Ayende;
• Command-Query Responsibility Segregation by Udi;
• MindTouch Dream principles of building lightweight decoupled services;
• Composite Application theory.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been discovering things like Advanced Message Queue Protocol (reading its specs is a pleasure of its own) and its implementations (Apache Qpid and RabbitMQ). There had also been a different approach to the REST services and concurrency handling as in the inspiring MindTouch Dream framework.

Obviously, the toolset is not your native Microsoft .NET toolset, but:

• MindTouch Dream works natively on Mono and .NET;
• Apache QPID and RabbitMQ have .NET clients;
• It takes just a few lines of code to write .NET Dream Service to act as a gateway between AMQP and REST;
• For some reason I like AMQP more than MSMQ;
• In a current world it takes less than an hour to procure a cheap running server out in the cloud.

It is also interesting to see how REST services and AMQP middleware services have their parallels with the classical composite applications:

• AMQP == EventBroker
• Services == IoC Container environment (roughly)

So basically, there are quite a lot of concepts and technological approaches that suddenly start making a lot of sense to me.

At the moment I’m interested in giving a try to build some learning prototype application using these technologies, just for the sake of practicing and learning pros and cons better.

Does anybody know of a common or specific problems out in the field, that require potential scalability and async processing? Something, where scalability, concurrency and sync processing create a lot of challenges.

Update: Jonathan has really nice article about Getting Started with DDDD and CQS (there are a lot of references there as well).

If you are interested in Cloud Computing, Windows Azure and some practical applications, then this short movie by Microsoft might interest you. It had been featured at PDC’09 and is partially based on the use case around Lokad (company I’m working in):

If YouTube player does play properly, then there is a separate link or downloadable movie files.

There’s also the original Cloud Computing Case Study on Windows Azure in Lokad made by Microsoft after a few interviews.

Given all the latest changes in the technology, and the possible trends, that start showing up, we can say that the cloud computing is going to be extremely important in the mid-term future.

Here’s another curious trend in the picture. It seems that stock markets might eventually add yet another commodity to their list – cloud computing instances. Amazon had recently announced EC2 Spot Instances as an ability to obtain computing capacity at a price matching proposed bit. Once there is some cost-effective and efficient platform for redistributing cloud computing resources, all these datacenters with idle server rack might follow in. Forces of Economics and expense optimization might bring forth interesting development solutions afterwards.