October 8, 2012

Notes from my Phone #1

Student in India using iPad at school.
After that last megapost, I decided to do a much shorter one on my phone, primarily to test out the Blogger mobile interface. Overall, it seems to work, using an external portable bluetooth keyboard to enter in content.

Today is the start of my post ACA career. I left on a high note, I believe, and am putting the final touches on a business process engine in MarkLogic that should both make things a lot easier for the application developers and make it possible to build workflow management pipelines without too much effort. This works by recognizing that a great deal of "enterprise bus processing" can be expressed as a series of transformations and validations on a given internal document as it moves from one state to the next.
ESBs work on the principle of moving documents around, but I'm coming to realize that by looking at "resources" (internal, abstract documents) as being in a workflow state as part of a workflow graph, you generally don't need to move the document around at all. 

I'm still pulling the pieces together, but if I work it right, I could end up replacing a lot of Java code, Of course, that may not necessarily set well with the people WRITING that Java code,
Interesting piece in the Washington Post this morning, talking of things technical. It seems that kids under the age of ten don't know what a mouse is.  Schools have been scrapping large, bulky desktops for pads with specialized "desktops" for a few years now - not only are they cheaper, but they are usually easy to locate, provide a more intuitive interface, and can go home with students in order to facilitate homework.

Discussions at Norwescon and on online educational forums seem to support this - we're in the midst of a computing revolution in the schools, Haven't investigated this area much yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a tablet equivalent of Hypercard waiting in the wings, if not already deployed, More on this soon.

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