peat dot org

“Peat” is to “OAuth” what “fat kid” is to “cheese burgers.”

I am all over this action.  This is the sort of thing that kicks down the doors of traditional big business and says “we can play together, even if we don’t trust each other.”

Here’s the description of OAuth from the draft specification:

“The OAuth protocol enables websites or applications (Consumers) to access Protected Resources from a web service (Service Provider) via an API, without requiring Users to disclose their Service Provider credentials to the Consumers. More generally, OAuth creates a freely-implementable and generic methodology for API authentication.

“An example use case is allowing printing service printer.example.com (the Consumer), to access private photos stored on photos.example.net (the Service Provider) without requiring Users to provide their photos.example.net credentials to printer.example.com.”

In other words, you can build an API for your hot new web app, give your customers control who and what gets to use their data, and provide a standard way for the development community to get access to your sandbox.

This sort of thing has been done in an ad hoc manner for years, but a widely embraced open standard is what it takes to get the attention of the big kids.  So, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon, folks.  This one is worth while.

I’m hot for OAuth.  And a side of fries.

This is the most original photo series I’ve seen in a long, long time.  Ever wondered how your tongue sees the world?

http://www.pinholephotography.org/MS1%20%27Enter%27.htm

Here’s an interesting excerpt from Werner Vogels’ Dynamo paper about some of the guts behind Amazon’s e-commerce platform:

“For example a page request to one of the e-commerce sites typically requires the rendering engine to construct its response by sending requests to over 150 services. These services often have multiple dependencies, which frequently are other services, and as such it is not uncommon for the call graph of an application to have more than one level.”

There’s no doubt Amazon uses extensive caching to keep performance up, but 150+ service calls to render a page is remarkable, regardless of how you cut it. Even more impressive is how all of these services are built around the assumption that something, somewhere is failing: disks are crashing, networks are flapping, and processes are dying.

Check out the paper for more details.

Update:  It looks like Ars Technica got interested and put together a little write up on Dynamo.