Jonas Bonér and Kresten Krab Thorup discuss some key aspects of Erlang like fault tolerance and reliability and how the Akka and Erjang projects try to bring them to the JVM.
FlightCaster recently open sourced Crane, a tool for distributing and remotely controlling Clojure instances, currently specialized for EC2. Incanter is a Clojure library and tool that makes R-like statistical computations easy with Clojure. Also: the build and dependency management tool Leiningen 1.0 is now available.
With the multiplicity of existing remoting mechanisms it is often necessary to build clients in a way that allows to swap/introduce new protocols with no/minimal impact to the client’s implementation. A new framework – CRISPY - provides support for such implementations.
Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems writes of the Fallacies of Distributed Computing; He observes that despite its profound implications when designing distributed systems, “you don’t often find them coming up in conversations about building big networked systems”.
David Syer and Mark Fisher on using Spring to develop concurrent and distributed apps, covering topics such as: asynchronous execution, intra-process, inter-process and inter-JVM communication.
Randy Shoup discusses the need for a new programming model targeted at the cloud, covering topics such as state/statelessness, distribution, workload partitioning, cost and resource metering, automation readiness, and deployment strategies.
Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson discuss how Erlang's design allows fault tolerance and resilience, modular error handling, details of the actor model implementation and distributed programming.
Mark S. Miller talks about the security considerations of JavaScript and how they are dealt with in ECMAScript 5 and the Caja project. He also mentions issues that have to do with HTML5 and compares the security characteristics of other languages like Java and Scheme.
Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discuss their ideas about parallel programming - whether shared memory is harmful, the place of message passing, fault tolerance, the importance of protocols and more.
