February 2008 Archives

Eric Newcomer has an entry up asking Have We Got it all Backwards with Software Assembly? Basically, Eric comes to the conclusion that

The easy part should be developing the reusable services. The hard part should be their composition and assembly.

Myself, having lived through several waves of "the software component market is going to really take off this time" (Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer comes quickly to mind), I have a rather similar view of this whole debate.

I think it's a big mistake to think that the analogy to mass production is the reusable software component. Quite frankly, the analogy to mass production is the disk copy - and with the internet, it's the download. From my point of view, there simply is no issue with mass production in the software business. We can create far more copies of anything than anyone could possibly make use of.

Production isn't the issue. Design is.

I've been having a great time working on my MMOG framework, 3rd-Space. Since December, I've been focussing on the actual event driven simulation framework, as this framework is key to the system's performance and scalability. The work is based on the simulation framework described by Rimon Barr in his thesis, An Efficient, Unifying Approach to Simulation Using Virtual Machines - something he calls "JiST" (Java in Simulation Time). It's a very cool event driven simulation framework that uses Java, itself, as the simulation scripting language. He turns the Java classes into a simulation by transforming the Java classes using a byte code rewriting framework. The result is a very easy to use, completely type safe simulation framework that completely blows the doors off the closest competing C++ event simulation frameworks in terms of raw performance and scalability. The performance is so good because the framework uses the Java virtual machine as the engine for running the simulation.