Remembering the Future

When I consider what contributed to the unraveling of J2EE, one thing that stands out is that it tried to do too much. The promise was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.

. . .

I've come to evaluate frameworks based on two rough metrics: how far the framework goes in solving the general case problem out of the box and how little friction the framework creates when you have to solve the specific-case problem yourself. When a framework finds a balance between these two areas, we call it "well designed."

Topics: Design | Architecture | Representation

Labels: Architecture, Design, Representation

Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistent over time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed.

Topics: Brain | Representation | RDF | Architecture

Labels: Architecture, brain, RDF, Representation