Steve Vinoski's Blog

The November/December 2012 issue of IEEE Internet Computing magazine contains my final “Functional Web” column covering the Nitrogen web framework. As with all my previous columns, this column is available here in PDF form.

My first column for IC appeared in March 2002, nearly 11 years ago. Back then my column, called “Toward Integration,” focused around enterprise middleware. My old friend Doug Lea, who was on the IC editorial board at the time, suggested that I write it, and who in their right mind would turn down Doug Lea? In March 2009 I stopped that column and began writing the “Functional Web” column, focusing on the use of functional programming languages and techniques for web development. Prior to writing for IC, I was a columnist for the C++ Report magazine, starting in January 1995, and then later continuing that column over in the C/C++ Users Journal. That column focused on distributed object computing, and I stopped writing it in 2005.

That’s a total of 18 years as a columnist, which is a lengthy duration for a side gig done on my own time (and for IC, done on a purely volunteer basis). My common goal for all the columns was to write for practitioners like me — to try to cover topics, approaches, and ideas that other software developers could immediately apply in their own work. I also saw column writing as a way to try to pay back all the authors from whom I had learned so much over the years.

But 18 years is enough, for now anyway. While I might return to publishing in the future, for now I just want to focus on technology and software development.

Thanks to all my readers for your feedback and encouragement over the years. You definitely made it all worthwhile.

For the “Functional Web” column in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Internet Computing, I wrote about Wriaki, an Erlang sample application my Basho colleague Bryan Fink wrote that implements a wiki on top of Webmachine and Riak. Wriaki is a nice, clean, and easy to understand example of how to write Webmachine applications. Here’s the PDF.

A number of folks planning to submit to our call for papers for “Programmatic Interfaces for Web Applications” requested an extension on the submission deadline, so we’ve decided to do just that, extending the deadline by a week from Nov. 1 to Nov. 8. We’re already expecting a pretty good number of submissions, and hopefully the extra week will allow for more submissions and submissions of extra high quality. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

For the Sep/Oct 2011 issue of Internet Computing, I am very fortunate to have Dean Wampler as a guest columnist. Dean put together a great column on Scala web frameworks (PDF) in which he looks beyond the venerable Lift and takes a peek into Play, Scalatra, and Finagle.

InfoQ recently posted my keynote from the March 2010 Erlang Factory Bay Area. The keynote, entitled Using Erlang in a Carrier-Grade Media Distribution Switch, presents some of the work my colleagues and I at Verivue have been engaged in over the past few years. Since it was an Erlang conference, the talk naturally focuses on the Erlang aspects of the work.