Amish Oriented Databases

Was Ray Ozzie right? I've been seeing a fair amount of information circulating about RDDB. RDDB is a document-oriented, RESTful database. Lotus Notes is a document-oriented, old database (and email program, calendar, workflow form generator). The cool thing is that all of my Lotus Notes knowledge, which was rapidly becoming worthless now has a chance to be valuable again if this sort of thing takes off again.

I was in a Rails training class with this guy who made his career on the back old Notes and their ugly little autogenerated web apps. He kept asking, "how do we keep this from becoming another Lotus Notes?" At the time, I was thinking, "how do I keep myself from being one of those guys who looks at every new technology in terms of some old technology that he actually had time to understand?" Now, looking at the potential resurgence in document oriented datbases, maybe he was right...nah. Rails is nothing like Notes, because, uh...it's dynamically typed? No, Notes had that. Works with Java now, thanks to JRuby? No, IBM took care of that with Domino+WebSphere. Hmmm. At least 37 Signals hasn't been sold to IBM while David H. grabbed the lead role at Microsoft.

Oh, wait, there is a difference. REST! I had posted a long while back about how my cousin made fun of me in front of a huge room of people because he asked what the two types of web services were (hoping for document oriented and remote procedure call as answers) and I said "REST". He said the REST people were like the Amish, got some laughs and proceeded to promote WS-*. At lunch after his talk, Bob Martin took my side, so I knew I had made at least an interestingly wrong decision. Tim Bray has a nice round-up of other smart people that were wrong about that. So sweet to be right about that, even though he could kick my shins in programming any day of the week. Except Sunday, when we Amish polish our wooden laptops. Anyway, maybe RDDB is more Amish Oriented Database than Rails Oriented.

So Rails has REST, and even though I swore off creating RESTful apps when the initial URL implementation was polluted with semi-colons, it's the real deal now. Not so much for the application, but for the API. It's great to have APIs that are platform independent. Most things like a Lotus Notes wouldn't bother with this- doesn't help with platform lock-in. I spent more time working with the Lotus Notes ODBC driver to suck data out of the system than was reasonable. Of course, they did support COM, which was the REST of the day (if CORBA was the WS-*).

Now, REST still needs a solution for the old federated identity problem (so many websites, so many passwords, so many usernames)...but there are plenty of options. Maybe my cousin is right about CAS? Seems Amish enough for me.