A (Big) Pair of Don't Miss Articles

We recently posted a pair of articles which deserve special mention -- Objects and Databases: State of the Union 2006 and MSDN Wiki: What's Up?.

First of all, let me warn you: "Objects and Databases: State of the Union 2006" is a big article. Really big. But it is worth every byte of your time to read it. In a nutshell, the article is the transcript of an OOPSLA 2006 panel discussion moderated by William Cook of the University of Texas at Austin (and co-author of the article Native Queries for Persistent Objects). Participants in the panel include Robert Greene from Versant, Derek Henninger of Progress Software, Patrick Linskey, BEA, Erik Meijer from Microsoft, Craig Russell from Sun, Bob Walker of Gemstone Systems, and Christof Wittig of db4objects.

While object databases are the focus of the panel, the participants tackle a range of topics, including the future of programming languages, what's right about Ruby On Rails, what database development might look like 10 years from now, and what's the impact of social environments like Second Life. It's a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion from start to finish (and there's a lot there between the two). Thanks to Roberto Zicari and the odbms.org for making this available.

The second article that you'll find particularly interesting in a Web 2.0 sort of way, is Scott Swigart's interview with Molly Bostic and Rob Caron who talk about Microsoft's MSDN Wiki project. It's also long, but not as long as "Objects and Databases." The goal of the project is to deliver MSDN documentation via a Wiki, which also opens the door for community members to contribute to the effort.

Bostic and Caron are core members of the MSDN Wiki team and if you develop for Windows and use MSDN at all, you better read this article because it lays out how you'll be getting Windows information in the future.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:03 AM  Permalink