Here's a thought for you: Part of the endurance of Unix is that it does the core things well (System Stability, running processes etc) but that it makes combining functions easy (where would we be without scripting as glue , the '|' operator and the ability to tail the last 500 lines of output from a process then grep the results?)
The more you think about it, the more Web 2.0 is heading the same way. You have big, stable processes like the Google Maps API , RSS feeds and other XML interfaces to-from your favourite website and tagging services from Del.icio.us to name but a few (or even your own Enterprise Apps written in Java). You have scripting glue (be it PHP, Ruby or even Perl) to tie them all together. What you get is mashups able to quickly evolve new services, but with serious industrial strength underpinnings to cope when your site appears on Slashdot.
Paul Browne
, based in Dublin, Ireland, has been consulting in enterprise Java with FirstPartners.net for almost seven years.
What are your best examples of Web 2.0 as a Unix box? You must be logged in to the O'Reilly Network to post a comment.
To give an example, yesterday I was setting up Del.icio.us to post a daily summary of links to my Wordpress blogs.
Yes, it does all manner quite technically advanced stuff under the covers, using XML-RPC (probably quite similar in difficulty to unix processes), but all I had to do was enter in the URL of my blog and the security code and it just worked (in the same way the pipe character just worked). OK, not everything is this easy, but how many years has Unix been around compared to Web 2.0? (ie things will get even easier)
Of course, for both Unix / Linux and Web 2.0 use still have the option of doing more advanced stuff using the Perl / PHP / Ruby script of your choice.
of course, the big difference is that i'm just a pleb user on the web2.0 unix - its not MY unix box, and the sysadmin team is full of BOFHs who never asks about downtime before they drop a service (http://martin-english.com/whatsup/2005/12/web-20-meltdown-v20/) .
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Unix is simple and sane; aggregating RSS feeds and writing XML tree-walkers is.... not.