Essential Software Architecture

Essential Software Architecture

Computer science is a field in which you often enough get nervous about about picking up a five year old book because it might be already outdated. Well, either I am behind on the topic or Ian Gorton‘s work is aging pretty well so far; a nice to-the-point cover-to-cover read that might not teach you a world of new technologies, but certainly helps with sorting the ideas about software architectures and architects you might have floating around in your head. In addition to that, it puts concepts such as Web Service, SOAs, MDAs, and Semantic Web nicely into perspective without being afraid to point out where they can’t hold up to marketing promises. I will be looking into getting a copy for my bookshelf.

[UPDATE]

It appears that a 2011 2nd edition has been published in May.

Google Health Retires

Google just announced the forthcoming end of their personally controlled health care record Google Health due to lack of widespread adoption. We have been working with the service since its launch in 2008 and used it as a back-end for various projects (most recently for a medication reconciliation tool tied to the SMART platform). Google Health was offering a very decent user interface, a fair amount of API support and some really good interfacing ideas; I hate to see this one go.

[UPDATE] You might deduct how important the project was in the end from the fact that it was not even worth a shutdown announcement for itself.

Cloud Computing and Software as Service in BMI

I gave the following presentation during a set of BMI related talks; it covers the cornerstones of cloud computing development and explores potential application fields in BMI.

It was created using Prezi, a neat little tool that allows you to break out of the power point cage. I am not entirely familiar with it (you will see some fairly uninspired slide clones in there), but the response of the audience was overall very positive, so I would recommend it.