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Normally I don't vote for self promoting links like this one, but this is very good content. Besides, who could resist a link inspired by a joke from Lowell!

I'm happy to see that I've sparked discussion with my joke =)

I have to agree with a lot of the points in the article, especially the point that developers should understand the network. I've found that the best developers are those that fully understand the inner workings of a computer, a network, and the TCP/IP stack. If you've ever wondered why a lot of older developers stress that "real programmers should learn C"... it's the same argument.

With the ever-expanding growth of high level languages like C#, more and more of the underlying code is hidden away from developers. Combine that with the boom of web services, and developers are writing applications that do every single call via a web service, trading data over the network in uncompressed, bloated XML format even when it's not necessary to do so.

The explosion of O/RM layers has sparked an even bigger problem... pulling extremely large sets of data from the database when it's not needed. I'm not blaming the O/RM layers for this, they are great frameworks that are getting better all the time... if you've ever used ActiveRecord you will understand the beauty of it. Still, put these tools in the hands of a programmer that doesn't fully understand the underlying technology, and you end up with an application that does separate lookups for every single sub-item, killing network and application performance.

As an illustration, there was a page in our ecommerce application at work that pulled a list of accessories for a given product. For every single accessory item, there was a separate lookup to another table. The page ended up doing 110 queries against the database on every single page load.... I rewrote the page to use a single query against the database, and then had to argue with the object oriented people about why we should use my version (1 query) against their version (110 queries). If they had fully understood the network and database layers, they wouldn't have been arguing.

Great article... I think it's the first time I've been quoted anywhere!

Thanks Lowell. I'd love to get that as a comment over at NPD; sorry if you've already posted it - not at a place I can approve comments yet. You should also have a personal e-mail from me. Anytime you want to tap us for ideas, feel free to send us an email with your questions, and we'll ask our team!

-- Brian Boyko
-- Editor, Network Performance Daily.

I tried to copy this comment over there, but all the line breaks got removed, which made it unreadable... I did post a link back to this page though, so anybody can read my response =)

I've gone back and repaired the settings for the comments on the blog - it now converts line breaks. Thanks for alerting me to the problem.