The current low interest rates are generally a consequence of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank actions in response to the now five-year old economic and financial crisis. It’s a crisis most visible in housing and mortgage loans, follwoing the conclusions of the biggest housing price boom in United States history. By 2005, sales of new houses was declining on year-over-year basis, and sales of existing housing was also receiving similar declines, and prices had been softening for new housing as well in many metropolitan cities in the U.S.

The Federal Reserve Bank Board of Governors failed to consider the potential consequences of the changes in the housing and financial markets, as of 2006. By the end of 2006, the economy already was shrinking by at least one important measure, total income. Ben Bernanke at that time was the most consistent voice to warn warning that the housing market’s difficulties could have broader consequences. The crisis was became apparent by some measures in 2005 with rising inventories of unsold new housing; with the conclusion to the rise in housing prices associated with the U.S. housing price bubble, prices stopped rising along with rising unsold inventory of new houses in 2006; by 2007 a drop in the average price of new houses was the first in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The U.S. was merely one of many developed countries that experienced a rapid rise in housing prices in the last two decades. See the international housing price-index graph further below. The U.S. crisis was aided and abetted by a U.S. financial industry that is collectively incapable of honestly describing the health of the economy and the companies, and financial products it promotes, as Mike Mayo describes in his book “Exile on Wall Street”; see an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal article “Why Wall Street can’t Handle the Truth“. See also: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis timeline of the financial crisis.

In 2011 and onward, individuals in a financial position to borrow and purchase housing at this time, are in most parts of the U.S. able do so at remarkably affordable costs, especially at the lower-price spectrum of the housing market, for housing in the 100,000 to 250,000 dollar range, with significantly reduced prices compared to 2006, combined with astonishingly low mortgage interest rates.

It is likely it will take more than five years for housing released to the market following mortgage foreclosure to be absorbed. Laurie Goodman of Amherst Securities Group, estimates that of approximately 55 million mortgages outstanding in 2011, 10 million mortgages are likely to go into default, thus continuing to depress housing prices as those newly foreclosed houses are sold into the market. Goodman’s testimony to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs U.S. Senate on September 20, 2011, is entitled “New Ideas to Address the Glut of Foreclosed Properties“.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank on September 21, 2011 announced a nine-month plan to purchase 400 billion dollars of longer-term U.S. treasury bonds and sell short-term treasury debt, to push down long-term interest rates; this in turn will push interest rates down in the U.S. mortgage markets for the duration of that Federal Reserve effort.

Here are graphs of the history of interest rates for 30-year fixed rate loans since the mid-1970s, and recent interest rates for both 30-year and 15-year fixed rate loans through 2011.

Data compiled by http://www.escapesomewhere.com/rates.html

Graph of data from U.S. Census showing national average and median price trends of new houses in U.S.
Source: http://www.census.gov/const/www/newressalesindex.html

Real House prices, North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia, 1970 - 2008 (1970=100) From: 'Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up' by Barry Ritholtz. Washington Post, November 19, 2011

U.S. Mortgage Interest Rates since 1900. By Steve Sjuggerud. 'Daily Wealth' http://www.dailywealth.com/1615/The-Best-Time-in-History-to-Buy-a-House

S&P Case-Schiller Housing Price Indexes 1987-2011 (via Barry Ritholtz / The Big Picture - http://ritholtz.com)

(This post is expanded and updated from time to time)

Douglas Crockford — The JSON Saga
• Video and transcript (50 minutes): The JSON Saga. (Published July 2, 2009, by Yahoo! Developer Network.)
• Slides: http://yuiblog.com/assets/crockford-json.zip

In “The JSON Saga”, Crockford describes how he was influenced by Lisp, Rebol, JavaScript (visible via his book “JavaScript: The Good Parts”), and XML. He also traces the history of markup languages and angle brackets, from Runoff, Scribe, through HTML and XML. A few quotes from the talk:

We found it [JSON] worked really well. It was extremely effective for the thing that we invented it for – being browser server communication – but we also used it a lot for inter-server communication. Our platform scaled hugely, so we could have lots and lots of boxes, and they needed to be kept in sync, and we found JSON was perfect for sending messages between the servers. We also used JSON to implement a simple database, so we just have keys, and for each key we’d store some JSON data. It made it really efficient for storing stuff and getting it back.

One of the benefits of having a really simple description of a data format is it doesn’t take much code to implement it. And when you’ve got code that’s this easy to write, there are a lot of people who will be willing to write it, and share it.

Every language expresses these differently, and will add a lot of other stuff on top of it, like type systems, and semantics. But they all have the same idea about what the data looks like, and JSON has the thing that’s common to everything. By being at the intersection, it turns out to be the thing that everybody can agree on, so it’s really easy to pass data back and forth.

More generally, Crockford on JavaScript, computation and computer languages:
• http://www.crockford.com/javascript/
• Douglas Crockford: JavaScript – The Good Parts
(Video of keynote talk at the 2007 Konfabulator Developer Day, discussing the evolution of JavaScript and his changing relationship to the language.)
• Crockford on JavaScript
A series of eight or more lectures conducted in 2010 and 2011, with transcripts for the first five, and links to accompanying slides. The first lecture surveys the history of computing machinery and the history of computer culture and languages influencing JavaScript. The remaining lectures give an introductory survey of JavaScript, with commentary on the “good parts”, the evolution of the language leading to the ECMAScript-5 standard and its strict mode, its functional model (derived from Scheme), its prototype object model (derived from Self), and generally, the rise of AJAX.
• YUI Theater, Yahoo Developer Network – More talks by Doug Crockford and others.
• Most of the videos have migrated over to Youtube, since Yahoo’s departure from serving video to browsers (as distinct from video file download). Crockford’s presentations are also available via the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Theatre channel on Youtube

• JavaScript: The Good Parts
Doug Crockford, Google Tech Talks, Web Exponents
(February 27, 2009)
Video: JavaScript: The Good Parts (1 hour, 4 minutes)
Slides: JavaScript the Good Parts

Google Code blog post about Crockford’s talk:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/03/doug-crockford-javascript-good-parts.html

Why Java Script Matters – talk given at Montana State University, Bozeman MT (Apr 20, 2011)
Video: Part One (32 Minutes) Part Two (34 Minutes)

• The State and Future of JavaScript
Doug Crockford, YUI Conference (October 29, 2009)
Video: The State and Future of JavaScript (56 minutes, with transcript)
Slides: The State and Future of JavaScript (powerpoint)

There’s pressure to make it a better compilation target. Now, this is a big surprise. Everybody thought that the Java VM was going to be the VM of the internet, but it turns out that JavaScript language is the VM of the internet. People are writing in Java, and Python, and lots of other languages, and then translating it into JavaScript because JavaScript, for all of its security problems, actually has a much better security model than everybody else. The CLR has a terrible security policy, Java has a terrible security policy — JavaScript is better than everybody else.

• Douglas Crockford — Project Future Video and transcript (43 minutes) (November 10, 2010).
This talk was given at YUI Conf 2010 (Yahoo User Interface Conference),
November 8-10, 2010, at Yahoo!’s main campus in Sunnyvale, CA.

Four introductory JavaScript lecture-videos by Doug Crockford (October, 2006):
• The JavaScript Programming Language (1 of 4)
• The JavaScript Programming Language (2 of 4)
• The JavaScript Programming Language (3 of 4)
• The JavaScript Programming Language (4 of 4)
• Slides: http://yuiblog.com/assets/crockford/javascript.zip

• Doublas Crockford – Advanced JavaScript (October 17, 2006) (links to three videos: 31, 25 and 11 minutes)
• Slides: http://yuiblog.com/assets/crockford/advancedjavascript.zip

• Douglas Crockford – An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM (October 11, 2006) (3 parts)
This lecture was recorded before the release of Internet Explorer 7.
• Slides: http://yuiblog.com/assets/crockford/theory.zip

• The Future of Programming Languages (Panel discussion)
Guy Steele, Douglas Crockford, Josh Bloch, Alex Payne, Bruce Tate; moderated by Ted Neward.
Strange Loop Conference 2010, Saint Louis, Missouri (October 15, 2010).
Video run-time 45 minutes.
The panel is asked in concluding to suggest a language that will help people learn the languages the panelists want people to learn. For example, in the past, for learning C++, it was often said it was useful to be exposed to Smalltalk; and for Scala, likewise, Haskell is a useful introduction.
• Bruce Tate (“Seven Languages in Seven Weeks”): IO (for prototypes, DSL, for JavaScript); Prolog.
• Josh Block (“Effective Java”): Scheme (simple, small, informative in approaching other languages); Assembly language at the processor level.
• Guy Steele: (Any three languages you don’t know), Clojure, Haskell.
• Alex Payne (BankSimple; “Programming Scala”): Forth, or Factor (for a bottom up low-level perspective).
• Douglas Crockford (“JavaScript, the Good Parts”): Scheme; Rebol (for DSL, dialects).

• CUSEC 2010 Keynote: Douglas Crockford – The Software Crisis
(Canadian University Software Engineering Conference)
Among many things he remarks upon, Crockford attributes a debt many modern programming languages and concepts owe to Smalltalk, which had the good fortune of eight years of gestation and re-writing before public release (funded by Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center), unlike the eight weeks that JavaScript had.
Link to excellent and detailed notes on the talk by Joey deVilla

• Doug Crockford on HTML and Fixing the Web
Interviewed by Ryan Slobojan. (Video and transcript.)
Strange Loop Conference 2010, Saint Louis, Missouri (October 12-15, 2010).
Selected quotations from this interview:

HTML5 is huge and complicated and it’s going to take years to get it right and finished. While that is going on, that may prevent correction of this more serious problem. The cross-site scripting problem has been with us for 15 years now and it is serious and in my view, the HTML committee was negligent in not dealing with it.

There is a proposal and it is not complete. One problem with the way that HTML5 rolled out is that the browser makers got way ahead of the standard. In a way that’s good because it allows for testing of the standard before it gets finalized. The problem with that is in exposing all of those APIs to the web early, a number of developers have started implementing stuff, applications, sites using HTML5. It’s half-baked still. So W3C is not warning “Don’t use HTML5 yet. It’s there just for testing purposes.” Because a lot of interoperability hasn’t been worked out yet, the proposals are going to have to change possibly in significant ways before they are finalized.

And if you are writing applications on it now, then they are going to fail when the proposals are corrected. The danger is that if enough developers get in front of this thing then we will not be able to correct the specifications because we don’t want to cause mass breakage. If that’s the case, then things are going to be like they were back in the Netscape era, except even more so, in which inter-browser compatibility is severely broken. The group that is going to suffer the most for that would be the web developers.

• Douglas Crockford, “JavaScript & Metaperformance”. Velocity Conference 2011 Santa Clara, California (June 14-16, 2011).
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrFpqmgv2DY (16 minutes)

• Douglas Crockford “Server Sidedness by Douglas Crockford at Yahoo! Open Hack EU 2011” Bucharest, Romania (May 14-15, 2011).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nafl-UjeOU0

• Douglas Crockford Heresy & Heretical Open Source: A Heretic’s Perspective
Strange Loop 2010 St. Louis, Mosurri, USA (October 15, 2010) (59 minutes) (Publishedon InfoQ.com)

Avi Bryant in his public presentations has surveyed topics in data and data persistence, along with programming in Smalltalk, Ruby, and JavaScript, as well as conceptions for web browser applications and web application frameworks. After my commentary below are annotated links to more than thirty of Avi Bryant’s public presentations and interviews, along with associated videos, podcasts, transcripts, slides and so on. Bryant’s blog presence has gone dark since his departure from Twitter on December 2, 2011.

I outline Avi Bryant’s description of the expanding client side opportunities available to designers of web application frameworks, along with a (rather too long) list of posts by others exploring aspects of the topic. The subject of frameworks is only one of many threads or challenges issued in Avi’s public talks, which run from 2003 through 2011. You can skip the preliminaries and see the list of talks directly.

Context and Background

Smallthought Systems
In 2005, Avi Bryant co-founded Smallthought Systems, Inc., along with partner and co-CEO Andrew Catton. Smallthought Systems was based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Bryant and Catton were subsequently joined in collaboration by Luke Andrews and Ben Matasar, and together they produced several public Smalltalk-based web applications in addition to private client projects. They created the online database DabbleDB, which was first exposed for public beta on October 24, 2005.

Seaside Smalltalk web application framework
DabbleDB was implemented using Seaside, a template-free web application framework written in Smalltalk. Avi Bryant developed Seaside with Julian Fitzell and others and Seaside was open-sourced in 2002. Seaside had been inspired by NeXT/Apple’s WebObjects approach to client browser and server interaction in its original Objective-C and subsequent Java versions. WebObjects focuses on the state and behavior of the application as distinct from the mechanics of URLs and HTML and HTTP requests. Avi prototyped the architectural ideas in Ruby, via the IOWA web application framework, and abandoned IOWA in 2001 when he elected to implement the approach in Smalltalk, as “Seaside”.

Smallthought’s financing and later projects
Smallthought Systems received a venture capital investment by Ventures West, a Canadian VC firm, rumored to be about two million dollars in June 2006, a transaction facilitated by Paul Kedrosky. The actual amount of the investment, the portion of the company sold, and the post-transaction valuation of the company was not disclosed by the participants.
In 2008 Smallthought released Magic/Replace, an online table-oriented data editing tool. A web traffic analyzer and trend-line display application and interpreter of Google Analytics data called Trendly was released in 2009 (while in beta, it was called “DSHBRD”).

Smallthought Systems purchased by Twitter
On June 10, 2010, Twitter announced that it had completed its purchase of Smallthought Systems, Inc., a hiring purchase of talent rather than an acquisition of software. All four Smallthought Systems developers joined Twitter as employees and moved to San Francisco, where they all resided the same city for the first time. Over the course of 2011, the online applications DabbleDB and Trendly were closed down. (Tim Bray reported on August 24, 2011 that he was able to sell his investment in Smallthought Systems at a profit. Bray’s shares had been converted to shares in Twitter and he apparently made the investment on similar terms as Ventures West & Kedrosky.)

Avi Bryant departs from Twitter
Avi Bryant announced, via Twitter, his departure as an employee on December 2, 2011. He indicated he would be working on new startups of a rather unspecified nature. Title

Server-centric web application frameworks are obsolete

Migrating away from Seaside
Since 2009 Bryant has described the process of slowly abandoning use of his own path-breaking Seaside Smalltalk web framework during several development and architecture iterations of Smallthought Systems’s Trendly, prior to Trendly’s initial release. Trendly’s final architecture loads an initial page and JavaScript to manage the JSON data interaction with the server, with the client browser generating the application’s HTML and graphics instead of the server. (Bryant and others had incorporated aspects of JavaScript client-side functionality in Seaside as early as 2004, as he described in a blog post Cosying up to the client-side, July 23, 2004. Subsequently the capability to use any JavaScript library was enabled for Seaside.)

Describing the Trendly development experience, Avi has surveyed how web application frameworks have failed to keep up with web browser capabilities, JavaScript engine improvements, and improving hardware and data persistence methods; Bryant has described the need for holistic tier-less web application frameworks that fully encompass both server-side and client-side development, enabling a designer to easily divide or shift the location of application functionality between client and the server as development effort or the application or browser functionality may require. He does not claim that existing application frameworks are useless, but rather that such frameworks are failing to take full advantage of the current environment.

Javascript as a compilation target

Smalltalk in the browser, via JavaScript
Desiring a Smalltalk environment for client-side programming during Trendly’s development, Avi Bryant and fellow Smallthought Systems developers created Clamato, a dialect of Smalltalk and cross-language code generator emitting JavaScript, self-hosting within the web browser, with a Seaside-like HTML builder and partial interface to the JQuery API. The name is a pun play on the idea of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine as V8 tomato-vegetable juice — and clamato juice (tomato juice and clam broth).

In creating Clamato, Avi Bryant indicated that his “main objective is to have a more pleasant environment in which to write the client-side of web applications. A secondary use case might be to just use the web browser as a development environment for code that was intended to run on, say, V8 on the server,” as well as to minimally map Smalltalk onto JavaScript. There is a Clamato browser demo, and a Clamato source repository, and Chris Cunnington produced a brief introductory Clamato video demo.

A dialect of Smalltalk running on JavaScript in the browser was first demonstrated by Dan Ingalls with Lively Kernel. Since Clamato’s creation, other Smalltalk-JavaScript projects have been released.
• Amber Smalltalk extends Clamato, with a jQuery binding, led by Nicolas Petton. Until the 0.9 release (September 14, 2011), Amber was called JTalk. (In September 2011, Avi Bryant remarked that the progress to-date on JTalk had eclipsed the initial Clamato effort, which had been fallow for two years.)   The Amber project has an active mailing list. Nicolas Petton’s introductory presentation about JTalk / Amber Smalltalk at ESUG 2011 is available as a video, along with the slides, which were written in Amber Smalltalk.
• Yet another in-browser Smalltalk dialect project is SilverSmalltalk which has an ExtJS binding, and is a project by Peter Fisk (SilverSmalltalk repository).

For those eager to avoid programming JavaScript, or desiring to work with the same language server-side and client-side, or interested avoiding JS’s multi-year standards revision process associated with the long half-life of some browsers, there are more than a hundred public cross-language JavaScript code-generator compiler-translator/parser projects. Among the many projects, CoffeeScript is a working prototype for some fraction of the proposals under consideration for the next couple of versions of ECMAScript, and Dart has had a measure of general visibility in 2011.

A growing number of JavaScript projects work towards narrowing the browser server-client dyad, with some aiming for a complete tierless app framework. Some individuals consider the projects prototypes for what could be done in other languages compiling to JavaScript on the client side, to develop a unified language platform for server and client. An arbitrary sample of projects in a proliferating area: Luna web app framework (unreleased: used internally by Asana), Derby.js, Racer.js, Cappuccino, SproutCore, Ember.JS (a renamed fork of SproutCore) [not to be confused with Ender.js], Node.JS, NowJS, SocketStream, Socket.IO, Express, Backbone.js, Common.js, Knockout.js, JSDOM. And Opa is an example of an open, tierless framework, DSL and web stack, with a compiler written in OCaml; naturally there are other tierless framework projects.

JavaScript and web application development

Selected blog posts and conference presentations surveying a fraction of the conceptual ferment in topics related to browsers, JavaScript, the client-server in web applications, asynchronous I/O, data persistence and data model synchronization, large and small webapp frameworks, and realtime applications. (JavaScript on the server is not a new idea; it was first implemented in 1996 by Netscape, but they incorporated many of PHP’s mistakes. Node.js implemented the server-side JS concept starting in 2009.)

• Adam Bosworth   Interview with Adam Bosworth   ACM Queue   (March 1, 2003)
• John Gruber   The Location Field Is the New Command Line   Daring Fireball   (June 22, 2004)
• Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah   On rich web applications, AlphaBlox and Oddpost   (July 16, 2004)
• Adam Bosworth   Ajax reconsidered   (June 1, 2005)
• Ian Bicking   Constraints and Continuations   (March 22, 2006)
• Francisco Tolmasky   The Road to Cappuccino (presentation slides & audio) AJAX Experience Conference, Boston   (September 29 – October 1, 2008)
• Bret Taylor   The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server &nbps; (September 10, 2009)
• Nicholas Zakas    JavaScript Application Architecture (slides),    Bayjax Tech Talks, San Francisco, California   (September 2009)
• Dan Ingalls   Node.JS What’s Up with Dan Ingalls   (April 26, 2010)
• Ask HN   What are current trends in web developing?   (June 2010)
• Trip Hawkins   Games need some SAAS   (June 20, 2010)
• Charles Jolley   The Next Revolution     SproutCore Blog   (July 1, 2010)
• Yahuda Katz     Here’s to the Next 3 Years    Katz Got Your Tongue   (September 2010)
• Julian Fitzell   Seaside – Why should you care?   Dynamic Stockholm 2010   (October 19, 2010)
• John Arley Burns   Why Mobile Apps Are Obsolete   Rant 3000   (November 18, 2010)
• Allen Wirfs-Brock    The Browser is a Transitional Technology     (January 31, 2011)
• Peter Michaux   MVC Architecture for JavaScript Applications   (February 24, 2011)
• Ian Bicking   JavaScript on the server AND the client is not a big deal   (March 30, 2011)
• Gilad Bracha     The Truthiness Is Out There    Room 101   (March 20, 2011)
• Nate Smith   Why I’m writing Vers, a JavaScript application framework  (April 4, 2011)
• Mike Driscoll    Node.js and the JavaScript Age    Metamarkets Blog   (April 8, 2011)
• Tom Dale    Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of JavaScript Frameworks     (April 11, 2011)
• John Hann    The Future is Modules not Frameworks (slides),    JSConf 2011, Portland Oregon   (May 3, 2011)
• Antranig Basman    The Future is Frameworks, not Modules (powerpoint slides),    JSConf 2011, Portland Oregon   (May 4, 2011)
• Brendan Eich    My JSConf.US Presentation    Slides: CoffeScript, JS.next, the JS Language Lab, JSConf 2011, Portland Oregon   (May 3, 2011)
• Thomas Reynolds   Javascript Microframeworks and The Future   Award-Winning Fjords   (May 9, 2011)
• Allen Wirfs-Brock    Web App Platform: Is it a Framework or is it an OS?     (May 22, 2011)
• Peter Michaux   JavaScript is Dead. Long live JavaScript   (June 25, 2011)
• Francisco Tolmasky   Objective-J and Cappuccino, with Francisco Tolmasky   Interview by Zef Hemel   State of Code   (July 4, 2011)
• Chris Nelson   Why it’s the late Cretaceous for server side MVC frameworks   MysteryCoder   (July 10, 2011)
• Kris Rasmussen   The Luna Framework: Reactivity, Sync, and Co-Simulation (video presentation)   Asana Blog   Luna Presentation slides   (July 27, 2011)
• @imccoy   Web Development: We Are All Doing It Wrong   Fine Shambles   (July 29, 2011)
• Sridatta Thatipamala   Why We Threw out All Our Code (And Why You Should Too)   NowJS Blog   (August 2, 2011)
• Nate Smith   Announcing Racer, an Experimental Realtime Model Synchronization for Node.JS   (August 17, 2011)
• Nicolas Petton & Göran Krampe   Jtalk, the Smalltalk for Web developers (Slides are also written in Jtalk) ESUG 2011 (European Smalltalk User Group Conference 2011) Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (August 29, 2011) About three weeks after this presentation, with the 0.9 release, JTalk was renamed Amber Smalltalk.
• Bernat Romagosa   Pharo, will you take Amber for your lawful friend?  A Smalltalk by the Seaside   (September 26, 2011)
• Chris Nelson   Web apps are dead, long live web apps   Gaslight Software Blog   (September 30, 2011)
• Alex MacCaw   Asynchronous UIs – the future of web user interfaces   (November 16, 2011)
• @imccoy   Grand Unifying Theory  Fine Shambles   (November 24, 2011)
• Yehuda Katz   Amber.js (formerly SproutCore 2.0) is now Ember.js   (December 12, 2011)

Links to Avi Bryant’s blogs:

• HREF Considered Harmful (2005 – 2010)   avibryant.com   (via Archive.org)
• HREF Considered Harmful (2003 – 2005) (Archive of blog hosted at Cincom)

Annotated links to Avi Bryant’s talks

• Smalltalk and Big Data
  Avi Bryant – Keynote talk description (March 14, 2011)
  Smalltalk Solutions (STS) 2011 Conference (March 13 – 16, 2011), Las Vegas, Nevada.
  • Video: Smalltalk and Big Data (60 minutes)
  • Slides: Smalltalk and Big Data
  • Audio: available in more than one format via James Robertson

  Avi Bryant on Seaside, and web frameworks generally.
  Before proceeding to the “big data” part of the talk Avi discussed the future of Seaside (and all other server-centric web application frameworks) in relation to the 2011 browser environment. Current browsers provide resources not available when Seaside was conceived in 2002:

  1. Seaside offers server-side modal continuation flow-control, which is no longer important (now modeless JavaScript client-side offerings are relatively easy to implement);
  2. Seaside offers server-side HTML generation (now, when passing only JSON back and forth to the server, the client-side JavaScript can generate the HTML);
  3. Seaside offers server-side stateful user-interface components (now, if state resides in the client, the server need not track state);
  4. Seaside offers unique callback IDs and this model of interaction architecture continues to grow in importance and has increasing acceptance as a general model. Cross-site request forgery (CSRF), for example, is much more difficult with session ID tokens in all transactions.

  Avi Bryant speculated that if he were to build the next version of Seaside, or some Seaside-like framework in the current web and browser environment, he would include a JSON-builder with callbacks, and he would drop from the framework methods that have been demonstrated to be superfluous for recent browsers, in the same way that various historical conceptions were dropped during the original creation of Seaside. He would drop Seaside’s components and continuations, Seaside’s server-side canvas API, while retaining Seaside’s callback and session token ID model in a re-designed framework.

  Selected quotations from “Smalltalk and Big Data”

  • “I may be saying Seaside is obsolete, but I have also said at a Rails conference, ‘Rails is obsolete‘ and I have also said at a Django conference, ‘Django is obsolete‘, because the fact is that none of the web frameworks out there right now are built with this architecture in mind. We still have an opportunity with Smalltalk to get out ahead, and still be in the forefront of web framework design. But we can’t rest on our laurels with what was the forefront of web framework design five or ten years ago.”
  • “I believe that there is a big difference between something that was designed for one architecture and has been adapted to a new one, and something that has been designed for a new architecture from the ground up. I believe if we tried [for] a clean-slate redesign of Seaside, not trying to keep any kind of support for the older architecture, that we would find new and better ways of doing things than when we were trying to graft something new onto what’s already there [in Seaside].”
  • “Burn the disk packs“
  • “A lot of the original design of Seaside was about throwing away what people believed to be important constraints: ‘You have to have shared nothing, you have to have clean URLs’ ”
  • “Seaside was an exercise in: ‘What if we throw away those constraints? What do we do, where to we end up, where do we go?’.”
  • “What I’m saying is it’s time to throw away the constraints of ‘we’re going to generate the HTML [on the server], we’re going to have a server-side component hierarchy.’ ”
  • “If we throw away those constraints, then where do we end up? I’m pretty sure it will end up in some place better than if we keep those constraints.”

  • Big data at Twitter background: Twitter’s analytics processes are described in a couple of presentations by Kevin Weil, who talks about Hadoop and MapReduce, and how (as of October 2010) 12 terabytes of daily data (tweets, time-stamps, followers, retweets, logs, etc.) were analyzed.
  NoSQL at Twitter InfoQ (video, 56 minutes) Strange Loop 2010, St. Louis (October 14, 2010)
  Hadoop and Pig at Twitter (video, 26 minutes) (slides) Kevin Weil, Hadoop Summit 2010 (June 29, 2010)
  • Link to all Smalltalk Solutions (STS) 2011 presentations: videos and slides, and speaker bios
  • Comment by Joachim Tuchel: Seaside without Continuations? (April 27, 2011)

• Rails is obsolete (but so’s everything else)
  Avi Bryant – Presented at GoGaRuCo 2010 – Golden Gate Ruby Conference (September 18, 2010) San Francisco, California.
  • The talk’s conference description: http://gogaruco.com/schedule.html#bryant
  • Video: Rails is Obsolete (But So’s Everything Else) (36 minutes) (video released April 11, 2011)

  Selected quotations from “Rails is obsolete (but so’s everything else)”

• “Web apps do not work the way they did in 2004.”
• “How should we change the 2004 design [of Rails] to work for 2010 web apps?”
• “It comes down to whether you care that there’s a bunch of stuff in your framework that is no longer useful, and whether you believe that that actively gets in the way. I believe that it is important to strip things down to the core of what you’re actually using…and I think that that probably leads to more interesting developments. If you take the step of throwing away views and controllers, then there’s a sort of a vacuum there that you are going be to actively working to fill. If you say, ‘Well, OK, I won’t use that part of the framework,’ the potentials for surprising elegance are probably less.”
• “My esthetics are towards pushing the envelope…”
• “I would argue that the most interesting new designs happen when you go back and throw away the old design decisions because your constraints have changed, and I so am loathe to continue to take on the constraints that I am hoping we are are rid of.”

• Django is obsolete (but so is everything else)
  Avi Bryant – Keynote at DjangoCon 2009 Django Conference (September 8, 2009) Portland, Oregon.
  Outlining the experience of developing Trendly, Avi describes the failure of his own creation, Seaside Smalltalk web application framework, and by extension, all other server-side web application frameworks, to fully accommodate complex client-side asynchronous JavaScript / JSON interactions along with client-side page and graphics generation for web applications. Plus a demonstration of the Clamato Smalltalk to JavaScript compiler, which was created to produce Trendly.
  • Video: Django is obsolete (but so is everything else) (48 minutes)
  • Summary and commentary (and links to others’ DjangoCon presentation slides) by Ted Leung: DjangoCon 2009

• Failure: An Illustrated Guide
  Avi Bryant – Presented at FutureRuby (July 12, 2009) Toronto, Canada.
  On the many iterations involved in successfully conceiving, developing and launching Trendly, a web-traffic data analysis tool; the changing implementation languages include JavaScript, Java, and Smalltalk. A description of why the Seaside Smalltalk web application framework was ultimately abandoned for Trendly.
  • Video: Failure: An Illustrated Guide   InfoQ   (22 minutes)

• Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk,  JavaScript and Clamato
  Interview with Avi Bryant by Werner Schuster at FutureRuby (July 9-12, 2009)  Toronto, Canada.
  Describing the conceptions used in time-series analysis program Trendly, the multiple implementations and rewrites to originally create Trendly (originally termed “DSHBRD” for “dashboard”), and the amalgamation of programming languages (Smalltalk, Ruby, Java, JavaScript) ultimately used to make Trendly, and the reliance on client-side JavaScript outside of a web application framework such as Seaside. Trendly generates its HTML from the client side, using JavaScript. The interview has an aside on time series statistics; details the invention and implementation of Clamato, an in-browser Smalltalk-to-JavaScript compiler used to produce Trendly. Also a survey of Squeak Smalltalk and related communities of interest.
  • Video and transcript: Avi Bryant on Trendly, Ruby, Smalltalk and JavaScript InfoQ (37 minutes)

• Speeding Ducks
  Avi Bryant – Presented at JAOO Sydney 2009 , Sydney Australia (May 5-8, 2009) and also at JAOO Brisbane 2009 (May 11-14, 2009)
  On the potential for Ruby, JavaScript and other dynamic languages to make use of the research and implementation work in Smalltalk and Self.
  • Slides: Speeding Ducks
  Also at these two conferences he gave a talk entitled
  • 1,001 Iterations: Product Design, Illustrated, an earlier version of the talk on describing developing Trendly that was presented two months later at the Future Ruby Conference, called “Failure: An Illustrated Guide”.

• Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal
  Avi Bryant at CUSEC 2009 – Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (January 22-24, 2009) Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
  On using research from academic sources that have not previously been applied to production operations, and a history of borrowings and development using Smalltalk. Also an introduction to Smallthought’s “Magic/Replace” web application.
  • Video: Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal (55 minutes)
  Avi Bryant also conducted an impromptu tutorial for a few people about the Seaside web application framework. Loren Segal wrote about the tutorial in Seaside Statefulness: Call-and-Answer (January 26, 2009).

• MagLev: Ruby That Scales
  Bob Walker (GemStone Systems, Inc.), Avi Bryant (Dabble DB)
  O’Reilly RailsConf 2008, Portland Oregon (May 30, 2008).
  A pre-alpha demo of Gemstone’s Maglev, a full-stack Ruby implementation, demonstrated running on a modified Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM and object-oriented database (with some Ruby-specific bytecodes; the bytecode is JITted to native code before execution). Maglev has an integrated distributed object cache, and integrated object data persistence storage. This pre-alpha version of Maglev was sufficient to run the WEBrick HTTP server library.
  • Video: MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 (17 minutes)

  Background to the Gemstone Maglev OODB effort described at Avi’s blog HREF Considered Harmful:
  • Ruby and other gems (March 8, 2008)
  • Maglev (May 28, 2008)
  • MagLev recap (June 1, 2008).

  Related Maglev commentary:
  • Bob Walker (of Gemstone) MagLev: Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM InfoQ Interview by Werner Shuster (April 30, 2008)
  • Chad Fowler: Maglev (June 5, 2008)
  • Glenn Vanderburg: Maglev (June 5, 2008)
  • Antonio Cangiano MagLev rocks and the planning of the next Ruby shootout Zen and the Art of Programming
  (May 31, 2008)
  • Charles Nutter Maglev Headius (June 1, 2008)
  • Obie Fernandez MagLev is Gemstone/S for Ruby, Huge News (May 30, 2008)

  Subsequent presentations and interviews about Gemstone and Maglev development by Gemstone personnel
  • James Foster   The Seaside Heresy (at OTUG) (video 1 hour 42 min.) Object Technology User Group, Minneapolis/St. Paul Minnesota &nsp; (September 16, 2008)
  • Bob Walker, Allan Ottis: Ruby Persistence in MagLev (video, 54 minutes)
  (November 6, 2008) RubyConf 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA
  • Martin McClure, GemStone Systems: Maglev (video, 60 minutes) (December 1, 2008)
  A question and answer session at Pivotal Labs describing the implementation process and thinking behind of Maglev.
  • Martin McClure, Gemstone Systems: presentation on building Ruby in Smalltalk for the Maglev project.
  • Video: Ruby in Smalltalk at ESUG 2009 (43 minutes)
  • Summary text ESUG 2009 conference report by Niall Ross (see pages 2 – 6 of this 57 page PDF)   ESUG 2009 conference (European Smalltalk User Group). Brest, France &nbsp (August 28 – September 4, 2009)
  • James Foster   Introduction to Gemstone (six videos, totalling less than an hour)   Smalltalks 2009 Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina.   (November 19, 20, 21, 2009)
  • Maglev Version 1.0.0 was released October 31, 2011.   (Gratuitous github 1.0.0 release commit on github.)
  • Monty Williams interview by Werner Shuster NoSQL OODB with Smalltalk-based Ruby VM: MagLev 1.0 Released   InfoQ   (November 15, 2011)

• Turning the Tables: Moving Beyond Relational Storage
  Avi Bryant, MeshU 2008 (May 20, 2008) (The day before Mesh Conference) Toronto, Ontario Canada .
  A workshop tour through design considerations for non-relational database choices, and when to consider memory store, flat files, object database, or a data service like Amazon’s SimpleDB and Google’s AppEngine. (He also gave an early demo of his work to create a pre-alpha version of Gemstone’s MagLev at this conference, which also demo’d at RailsConf 2008 a week later.)

• Two interviews of Avi Bryant: DabbleDB, Smalltalk & Data Persistence; MagLev & Gemstone
  Interview with Avi Bryant by Werner Schuster at QCon London 2008 (March 12-14, 2008)
  Video and transcripts:
  • DabbleDB, Smalltalk and Data Persistence
  • MagLev and GemStone

• Ruby and other gems (Data persistence using Gemstone)
  Avi Bryant’s blog – HREF Considered Harmful (March 08, 2008)

• The Lab with Leo Laporte: Episode 83 – Avi Bryant (2008)
  Conversation & Demonstration of DabbleDB
  Video (nine minutes): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=452514358946417718

• Chatting with Avi Bryant
  Interview of Avi Bryant by Fabio Akita (Posted December 15 and 22, 2007).
  A text interview outlining the conceptions used for Seaside, the implementation of DabbleDB, the process for bootstrapping the DabbleDB startup, and commentary comparing Ruby and Smalltalk.
  • Part 1 – Chatting with Avi Bryant
  • Part 2 – Chatting with Avi Bryant
  An excerpted quotation of Avi Bryant from the interview:
    ”The main thing I think WebObjects did right was to focus on the state and behavior of the application, rather than on the mechanics of URLs and HTML and HTTP requests. So rather than worry about what a field was named, you would just say ‘this field is bound to this instance variable in my model’, and rather than worry about what URL a link went to, you’d say ‘this link triggers this method on my page object’. Transitioning between pages was done by constructing a new page object and setting it up directly in Java, rather than constructing a URL that was going to be parsed to build a page. That directness and general style is something that very heavily influenced Seaside.”

• FLOSS Weekly 21: Avi Bryant on Seaside Podcast (November 23, 2007)
  Host interviewers Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte.
  This Week in Tech (TWiT). (Running time 59 minutes.)
  Avi describes his progression to primarily using Smalltalk and his co-creation of the Seaside Smalltalk web application framework in the pre-Ruby on Rails era.  His explorations were inspired by Apple’s pre-Java Objective-C version of WebObjects, with an initial exploration in creating the Ruby web application framework Iowa (which was abandoned in favor of relying on Smalltalk and developing Seaside). Seaside, as an open source project was taken over by the larger community during the course of version 2.  Interestingly, in passing, Avi admits he’s not much of an implementer of tests while programming in Smalltalk.
  • Podcast: http://twit.tv/floss21

• Smalltalk’s Lessons for Ruby
  Avi Bryant (Keynote) at O’Reilly RailsConf 2007 (May 18, 2007)
  On the opportunities to be taken by considering Ruby a variety of Smalltalk, and implementing Ruby on the Smalltalk virtual machine, taking advantage of 30 years of development in Smalltalk. A corollary, Ruby could have native object persistence instead of object relational mapping, in the same manner that Gemstone/S has implemented it for Smalltalk. Plus a 15-minute Smalltalk demo and question and answer session to the Ruby / Rails audience.
  • Video: http://railsconf.blip.tv/file/568689/ (38 minutes)
  • Podcast: (31 minutes) http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3432.html#
  • (Avi Bryant’s slides were not released)
  • Commentary on the keynote by Giles Bowkett, Patrick Joyce and on Lambda the Ultimate (Link to other RailsConf 2007 presentation videos)

• Simple vs. Magic: A Study in Contrast
  On developing a color scheme feature, keyed to a user’s logo colors.
  Ignite Expo at Web2.0 Expo 2007, San Franciso (April 15, 2007)
  As described in the DabbleDB blog White- (or green, or blue, or yellow) label Dabble (April 3, 2007)
  A flash talk summarizing developing the color theme feature, and the color theory necessary to calculate :
  • Video: Simple vs. Magic: A Study in Contrast   Ignite Seattle 2007

• Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant
  Interview of Avi Bryant by Mike Pence, with commentary about development of Seaside.
  • Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant (posted on caboose.org. April 8, 2007)

• Applied Web Heresies
  O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2007 (ETech) (March 26, 2007)
  Hands-on tutorial session: Avi Bryant demonstrates how to develop a web application framework from a modern dynamic language of the participant’s choice. Avi describes the inspiration, decisions and implementation for Seaside (in Smalltalk), so that participants can apply the same ideas using another programming language.
  • Applied Web Heresies session slides PDF
  • Phil Windley’s commentary and notes on the session from a Ruby implementation perspective: http://www.windley.com/archives/2007/03/applied_web_heresies_etech_2007.shtml

• A conversation with Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton about Dabble DB
  Interview by Jon Udell (January 19, 2007)
  • Podcast: http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/01/19/a-conversation-with-avi-bryant-and-andrew-catton-about-dabble-db/

• Data Refactoring for Amateurs
  Avi Bryant – Dynamic Languages Symposium 2006 (October 23 2006) OOPSLA 2006 Portland, Oregon, USA
  • Slides for  Data Refactoring for Amateurs
  This talk describes a number of the conceptions used in the design for DabbleDB for migrating data upon import, or for later user-transformation within DabbleDB.

• Avi Bryant demos DabbleDB with John Udell
  The Screening Room #10: Dabble DB (October 2006)
  • Screencast: http://jonudell.net/udell/2006-10-31-the-screening-room-10-dabble-db.html

• Summer at the Seaside
  Interview with Avi Bryant by Daniel H. Steinberg on the Distributing the Future podcast (August 7, 2006).
  Background on developing the Seaside web application framework and DabbleDB
  • Podcast:  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/08/07/distributing-the-future.html

• Web Heresies: The Seaside Framework
  Avi Bryant’s talk at OSCON 2006 – O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Portland Oregon (July 27, 2006)
  An introduction to Seaside and its architecture, describing its original design using closures and shared state. Surveying the architecture of Canvas, Component, Callback and Continuation models: how that Seaside’s HTML generation API frees the programmer from the presentation layer details; how continuations allow freedom from thinking about state-machine workflow, enabling application modularity.
  • Avi’s OSCON 2006 report to the Seaside email list. The presentation slides were not published.
  • Commentary on Web Heresies session, by Kevin Yank, Sitepoint (July 28, 2006).

• An Introduction to DabbleDB
  OSCON 2006 O’Reilly Radar: The Executive Briefing (July 25, 2006)
  Brief presentation on DabbleDB. Sharing the stage with with presentations by other startups:
  Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
  Avi Bryant, Dabble DB
  Kevin Cochrane, VP of Web Content Management, Alfresco;
  Adrian Holovaty, Editor of editorial innovations, Django
  Dave Rosenberg, Founder and CEO, Mulesource
  Javier Soltero, CEO, Hyperic
  Mark Spencer, President, Digium
  Jeff Waugh, Consultant, Gnome/Waugh Partners
  Scott Yara, President and Co-Founder, Greenplum

• Avi Bryant – Ruby on Rails Podcast  (December 22, 2005)
  Perspectives on Ruby, the Rails web framework, and description of the Seaside Smalltalk web framework, and its use as a foundation for DabbleDB, which was in private beta at that time.
  • Podcast (26 minutes): http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Technology/Computers/Ruby-on-Rails-Podcast/6913#3
  • MP3 file: http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/system/audio/2005/Avi-Bryant.mp3

• Presentation by Avi Bryant on Seaside to Vancouver Lisp Group – lispvan   (August 25, 2005)
  • Seaside demonstration video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9059529534041031582 (67 minutes) (August 26, 2005)
  • Slides (from the Smalltalk Solutions Conference 2004)
  • Commentary by Bill Clementson: Summmary of lispvan August 2005 meeting

• Web application frameworks in Smalltalk and Common Lisp
  Avi Bryant (Seaside) & Marc Battyani (Fractal Framework)
  Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium   (April 26, 2005)
  • Avi Bryant’s abstract of of the talk:
  On the web, abstraction is a dirty word. The dominant paradigms and philosophies of web development — CGI, Servlets, Server Pages, REST– provide only a thin wrapper around the low-level details of HTTP, and encourage you to use the rough stones of the transport protocol as the direct building blocks of your application. Web developers by and large reject any further abstraction in the way that assembly hackers once rejected structured programming: it’s too inflexible, uses too many resources, and above all, it doesn’t let you see what’s *really* going on. As a result, web applications suffer the same problems now that assembly language programs did years ago; they’re fragile, verbose, difficult to maintain and ill-suited to reuse.

  That’s not to say that better abstractions aren’t available. The Lisp and Scheme communities have been working on them for years. Paul Graham’s ViaWeb pioneered the use of closures, not query parameters, to capture application state in each link. Christian Quiennec showed how to use first class continuations to invert the flow of control of HTTP and put the server back in the driver’s seat. Macro packages like htmlgen bring HTML into the language itself, opening up much more than a template system can provide. Meanwhile, object-oriented packages like WebObjects have demonstrated how to decompose the web page into a tree of stateful, interacting objects, allowing a finer granularity of development.

  Seaside combines these ideas and others with the rich development environment of Smalltalk to provide a stable, complete, and innovative web application platform. This talk will introduce Seaside, and will focus in particular on the ways in which these abstractions can be leveraged to enable reuse: how to use closures, continuations, and intelligent HTML generation to destroy the intra- and inter-page coupling that is holding web development back.

  • Marc Battyani on Lisp Fractal Framework. Slides: Fractal Framework (Powerpoint)
  and an article with more detail: A Framework for Automatic Web Application Generation
  • Comment on the topic by Bill Clementson: Using a Lisp Web Server Behind Apache

• Winning the Application Server Arms Race: Using Smalltalk to Redefine Web Development
  Keynote by Avi Bryant. Smalltalk Solutions Conference (STS) 2004. Seattle, Washington, USA. (May 3, 2004)
  • Presentation Slides / PDF
  • Avi Bryant’s draft notes for the talk (February 4, 2004)
  • Nial Ross’s conference summary and session commentary, at page 2:
  http://www.esug.org/data/ReportsFromNiallRoss/Niall%20Ross%20StS2004%20report.pdf
  • John McIntosh’s transcript & notes on the talk (via Archive.org)
  • James Robertson comments on the keynote (posted May 3, 2004):
  http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3261049347
  • Colin Putney’s comments on the keynote and conference (posted May 10, 2004):
  http://www.wiresong.ca/air/2004/05/10/sts-2004-getting-away-with-smalltalk

• Making Object Relational Data First Class
  Smalltalk Solutions (STS) 2004, Seattle, Washington, USA. (May 4, 2004)
  Abstract of the talk:
  ROE, the Relational Object Expression library, models relational queries as first class Smalltalk expressions. This has several advantages over using SQL strings directly:
  • queries can be built using familiar Smalltalk syntax and without worrying about binding and escaping data
  • queries can be easily composed, so that a complex query can be built up over several methods, none of which know any details about the others
  • queries look like ordered collections of tuples, but with most operations other than #do: defined lazily; for example, #copyFrom:to: won’t pull in any data, but will simply produce a new query with an extra clause
  • queries maintain a rich set of metadata, so that, for example, the columns of any query can be automatically grouped by table and its rows mapped properly into objects.

  ROE can either be used directly as a better interface to relational databases, or as a new foundation for object/relational mapping tools. Currently, it has only been tested using PostgreSQL and Squeak Smalltalk, but it could easily be ported to other platforms.

• A Walk on the Seaside (Tutorial)   Avi Bryant   (2003 & 2004) (last updated for version 2.5 of Seaside)

• Controlling the Back Button in SeaSide (Tutorial, PDF) (posted January 14, 2004)
  Avi Bryant and Stéphane Ducasse

• HREF Considered Harmful: Structured Web Development with Seaside Tutorial  
  Avi Bryant & Julian Fitzell   Smalltalk Solutions (STS) 2003, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (July 14, 2003)
  • Workshop description
  • Avi Bryant comments on WebObjects by Apple/NeXT (in Java) and IOWA (in Ruby)   (August 18, 2003)

• Initial pubic description of Seaside   (2002) (Beta4.com archived page)
  Avi Bryant & Julian Fitzel begin supporting Seaside and marketing development of applications using Seaside. Links to initial documentation with architecture and design overview for developers using Seaside.

• Explicit Programming
  1st International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development
  Enschede, Netherlands (April 23 – 26, 2002)
  Presentation of the paper Explicit Programming by Avi Bryant, Andrew Catton, Kris De Volder, Gail C. Murphy (all then of University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada). Published in AOSD 2002 – Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development. ACM – Association for Computing Machinery.
  Abstract excerpt:
  “Many design concepts can be expressed only indirectly in source code. When this occurs, a single concept at design results in a verbose amount of code that is scattered across the system structure. In this paper, we present explicit programming, an approach that enables a developer to introduce new vocabulary into the source to capture a design concept explicitly. … We believe explicit programming provides a useful engineering point, balancing modularization and separation in (at least) two cases.”
  • Explicit Programming (PDF)
• Explicit Programming: Improving the Design Vocabulary of Your Program
  Avi Bryant, Andrew Catton, Kris De Volder and Gail Murphy
  (Demonstration) OOPSLA 2001 (Tampa Florida)
  • Explicit Programming demo proposal (PDF) (via Kris De Volder)

The Introduction to the interview:

Leslie Lamport is a legendary figure of computing. While he is probably most well-known because of the open-source typesetting LaTeX macro package and book, arguably his most important contributions are in the domain of distributed systems; this is also the subject of this interview.

Y Combinator Is Boot Camp for Startups
By Steven Levy, Wired Magazine, June 2011 (May 17, 2011)
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_ycombinator/all/1

How Y Combinator Helped 172 Startups Take Off
Paul Graham interview – (Feb 2010) [transcript & video; run-time about an hour]
http://mixergy.com/y-combinator-paul-graham/

Paul Graham’s Checklist, Would You Make The Cut?
by Evelyn Rusli, July 30, 2010, TechCrunch [video]
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/30/paul-grahams-checklist-would-you-make-the-cut-video/

Office Hours with Paul Graham, Y Combinator
TechCrunch Disrupt Conference 2011, June 2011, New York City.
Video: http://techcrunch.com/disrupt/video/watch/id/h0NTFoMjpLdHLYexw-wt0QEkK9erb9DR/

Paul Graham On Founder Power And The Rise Of New York Venture Capital (June 2011)
TechCrunch Video: http://techcrunch.tv/watch?id=s1dnNsMTrvh-eFQhTzm4YTDN2aP1HOH1

Seaside Smalltalk web application framework
• History of Seaside Smalltalk web framework
Initially created by by Avi Bryant, Julian Fitzell and others.
(first publicly released as version 0.9 in 2002)

• Winning the Application Server Arms Race: Using Smalltalk to Redefine Web Development (PDF)
Avi Bryant (keynote), Smalltalk Solutions Conference (STS) 2004, Seattle WA (May 2004)
(Summary of keynote speech, starting on the 3rd or 4th page.)
Also, James Robertson’s summary of Avi’s presentation (May 3, 2004)

• “Seaside is to other smalltalk web toolkits as Smalltalk is to most other Object Oriented programming languages; it’s as simple as that.” Cees de Groot.
• “Seaside is not (just) better, but better in the same way that Smalltalk is better, by using live objects not dead data.” Avi Bryant

Monticello Smalltalk version control
• Motivations behind Monticello version control system for Smalltalk (Colin Putney & Julian Fitzell, July 24, 2003)
Monticello was initially worked on by Avi Bryant, Colin Putney, Julian Fitzell and others.
Monticello http://www.wiresong.ca/monticello/

CSV parser
Parsing comma separated values (CSV) from a file or data stream. Avi Bryant published a CSV parser in 2005 on the Smalltalk open source repository, SqueakSource.
• http://www.squeaksource.com/CSV.html

Data persistence
A custom object-oriented data base was developed, which resides in the user’s Smalltalk image. When active on the server, the data is loaded in RAM, with the image. When swapped out, the entire image and data is saved to disk. Apparently commercial OODB backends were considered, such as Gemstone, but licensing costs were too high to incorporate into DabbleDB.
• Does DabbleDB use a database? (May 17, 2006) http://forum.world.st/Does-DabbleDB-use-a-database-td87282.html (Seaside mailing list.)
• Ask YC: Object databases (October 30, 2007) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73972
• Examples of in-image data persistence: Ramon Leon, Simple Image Based Persistence in Squeak (January 14, 2008); and Sean DeNigris, Smalltalk Simple Image-based Persistence (May 30, 2011).

Easy migration of data
• Data Refactoring for Amateurs (slides) Avi Bryant – Dynamic Languages Symposium 2006

Rapid development
Avi Bryant estimated in a 2006 interview that in the vicinity of two and a half man-years of effort went into the initial launch of DabbleDB.
• http://news.squeak.org/2006/10/31/ocean-waves-the-applications-built-on-seaside/

1. Upgrade cost per increment of capacity decreases as capacity rises.
2. Network costs scale primarily with the number of troubleshooters required to run them, not with capacity.
3. Under market pressure, network pricing evolves from metered to flat-rate.

Here are links to articles and books detailing the view that you and the people you have around you, along with your continuing intent, focus and perseverance are fundamentally important in accomplishing and improving a project, and that your (initial) idea for a project is merely the seed to further evolutionary and transformative activity. (An occasionally updated post.)

Critical reviews of two 2010 books on the environment surrounding idea development, implementation and innovation:
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (Riverhead)
The Innovator’s Way: Essential Practices for Successful Innovation by Peter J. Denning and Robert Dunham (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press)

Where Do Good Ideas Come From? by Richard Katzev, Marks in the Margin (November 4, 2010)
People and Places That Innovate by Nancy F Koehn, New York Times (September 5, 2010)
 

Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
The Value of Ideas
Scott Adams  (June 4, 2010)

You have to let an idea evolve, change and even fail…

Milton Glaser:
Fear of failure (video) 7:30
“The model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success…
The real embarrassing issue about failure is your own acknowledgement that you are not a genius. That you are not as good as you thought you were. And, doing a project that is truly complex, and difficult, tests your real ability…
The thing we most fear in regard to failure is our own self-acknowledgement that we really don’t exactly know what we’re doing. There is only one solution. You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing. That is the only way to deal with the issue of success and failure, because, otherwise, you simply would never subject yourself to the possibility that you are not as good as you want to be, hope to be, or as others think you are…
My advice about failure is that there is only one way out: Embrace the failure.”

Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway
Jason Cohen A Smart Bear (September 19, 2009)

Cultivate Teams, Not Ideas
Jeff Atwood – Coding Horror (January 25, 2010)

Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice: Just Stop.
Jason Freedman – humbledMBA (February 15, 2011)

Got a Great Idea? Tell Everyone!
David H. Freedman – New York Times (February 21, 2011)

Why smart people defend bad ideas
Scott Berkun (April 2005)

Top ten geek business myths
Ron Garret (fka Erann Gat) (October 1, 2006)

8 things I wish I knew before starting a business
Don Rainey – VentureBeat (August 19, 2010)

This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.
Will Shipley, quoted in Daring Fireball (August 15, 2007)

How to bring ideas to life PDF (January 2011)
Idea Mensch

The Shortcut We Took to Build Yipit in Three Days
Vinicius Vacanti, co-founder of Yipit.com (December 20, 2010)

They will steal your idea: They cannot steal what really matters
Jason Baptiste (July 20, 2010)
“They cannot steal your…long term vision; domain expertise; market failure driven pivots; talent; analytical insights; passion for great service; passion to make this idea a reality.”

Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development
Alistair A.R. Cockburn
Humans and Technology – HaT Technical Report 1999.03, (Oct 21, 1999).
Presented at the 4th International Multi-Conference on Systems, Cybernetics and Informatics, Orlando, Florida, (June, 2000)

Five Reasons to Drop Non Disclosure Agreements
Eoghan McCabe (April 22, 2008)
“Whatever your idea, however smart it is, at least ten people have already had it. What makes you special is that you’re doing something about it now.”

Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Will Shipley (April 2, 2011)

A Student’s Guide to Startups
Paul Graham (October 2006)
Graham essentially says among the biggest challenges in a startup is to find co-founders, and that the school environment is an excellent one to discover and assess your potential cofounder.

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Paul Graham (April 2005)
“The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out.”

How to Start a Startup
Paul Graham (March 2005)
All of the below quotations are from this essay.
http://paulgraham.com/start.html

The Idea

“In particular, you don’t need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn’t take brilliance to do better.”

“An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you’ll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.”

People

“What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can’t save bad people. “

“For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?”

What Customers Want

“It’s not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don’t give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?”

“It’s the same with technology. You hear all kinds of reasons why startups fail. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed?”

Raising Money

“Talk to as many VCs as you can, even if you don’t want their money, because a) they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and b) if you seem impressive, they’ll be discouraged from investing in your competitors. The most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if you only want them to know about you and don’t want their money, is at the conferences that are occasionally organized for startups to present to them.”

October 21, 2009 — Physicist Lawrence Krauss talks about the current picture of the universe and how it could have come from nothing. Via The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science http://richarddawkinsfoundation.org

Background on the founders and development of DabbleDB and other Smallthought Systems applications:
- Avi Bryant’s Presentations
- A few of DabbleDB’s foundations

The DabbleDB documentation can be found via archive.org. The user forum still seems to be accessible.

- – - – - – - – - – -

June 11, 2010
I have been an enthusiastic user of Smallthought Systems’ DabbleDB, as an outstandingly-implemented online web-database, suitable for wide use by non-programmers. I had a number of clients using it. I became active on the DabbleDB user-forum to better describe for myself and for my clients the actual limits of DabbleDB and what it can and cannot do. Here’s the video demo: http://dabbledb.com/demo/ I admit that DabbleDB inspired me to learn and use Smalltalk and Seaside.

For the time being, I’m sanguine about Twitter’s purchase of Smallthought Systems, and the future of DabbleDB. Twitter wants the brains of the Smallthought team for analytics apparently. See Twitter’s blog post describing the purchase. Smallthought Systems co-founder Andrew Catton has via the DabbleDB forum stated the intention to keep operating for the near-term, and emphasized that a shut-down clock was not running, merely, not accepting new accounts, and committing to 60 days notice, when and if a significant change arrives. That’s fair, given the circumstances they put themselves into. They could have simply closed the project down.

The founders put five years into DabbleDB, and it’s a viable platform, and I’m sure they don’t want it to die. I speculate it has sufficient revenue to sustain operations with a healthy surplus at this point–so I think it is valuable to some interested party. I think they need only to find a home with a team of Smalltalk, Seaside, JavaScript, developers, and the financial backing to finance it.

Separately, perhaps the software, as distinguished from the online service, could be an item of interest for a non-operating company like Gemstone, with their enterprise-level Smalltalk-based object-oriented data and server technology. Gemstone was acquired by by VMWare’s SpringSource division in May, 2010; perhaps it might be a good fit to market DabbleDB as installable software that would increase demand for their database backend. See: http://www.gemstone.com/products/gemstone.

I’m sure there are others that would like to take DabbleDB forward.

I was, prior to the acquisition of Smallthought Systems by Twitter, working on writing a comprehensive set of the “missing” DabbleDB documentation. That project was suspended pending a commitment that DabbleDB would continue to be maintained and offered. For those who care, my scattered advice and documentation can be found on the DabbleDB user forum, via the user “Redtexture“; a selection of my more significant and popular posts can be found at the DabbleDB Frequently Asked Questions sub-forum.

More Than Dabbling
Kevin Weil – Analytics Lead at Twitter, Twitter Blog, Thursday, June 10, 2010

Life, Changing
Avi Bryant, HREF Considered Harmful (Blog), June 10, 2010

Announcement
Andrew Catton, The Dabble Blog, June 10, 2010

Migrations and hatching: This appears to be a year of change.
Luke Andrews, Attaboy (Blog), June 10, 2010

Twitterers (via Avi Bryant)
Ben Matasar, June 10, 2010

Twitter Buys an Analytics Company
By NICK BILTON, New York Times, June 10, 2010

Twitter Analytics No Longer An Afterthought With Smallthought Buy
Leena Rao, TechCrunch, Jun 10, 2010

DabbleDB Acquired by Twitter
James Robertson, Smalltalk with James Robertson (Blog), June 10, 2010

In a June 2006 transaction, Series A venture financing of Smallthought Systems was completed. The specific amount invested was not confirmed by the participating parties, but rumored to be in the vicinity of two-million dollars. The transaction was facilitated by Paul Kedrosky, a Canadian based in Silicon Valley, California.

The fraction of shares sold in the financing was not disclosed, and no total valuation for the company was reported or even speculated on in the press reports for the transaction. Subsequent to the deal, Kedrosky became a board member of Smallthought Systems, and became a partner of Ventures West, the Vancouver investment group participating in the deal. The founders of DabbleDB were reported as taking their time, assessing the potential for good advice and future contacts; they had turned down a number of VC firms prior to the Kedrosky/Ventures West deal.

Avi Bryant also disclosed in a December 2007 interview that Tim Bray was also an investor. Bray apparently made his investment on September 6, 2006, and did not disclose the amount invested. On August 24, 2011, Tim announced he had sold his shares in a transaction facilitated by SharesPost , and Twitter had exercised its 30-day first-refusal rights to buy the shares after a bona fide offer had been made by another buyer.

Sources:
Okay, I guess I’ll take your money Mathew Ingram June 27, 2006 (formerly with Globe and Mail, departing January 2010; Ingram has also been an organizerfor the Mesh Conference in Toronto)

VCs Dabble with Canadian Web 2.0 startup
Mathew Ingram
Globe and Mail – Toronto Canada
Published on Tuesday, June 27, 2006; updated Monday, April 06, 2009

The presentations are either by or interviews of James Coplien, along with links to works mentioned. I extracted a set of selected quotations from one interview. Jim Coplien is the co-creator of Data, Context and Interaction architecture in collaboration with Trygve Reenskaug. Trygve Reenskaug is the creator of Model View Controller (MVC) architecture.

In the (below linked) 2010 London QCon interview, Coplien discusses conceptions and misconceptions in current object-oriented programming culture and how technique and methodology fail to substitute for the thinking actually required to accomplish a project. He also describes how languages can affect conceptualization, and argues that some popular languages focus excessively on classes instead of working objects. He briefly discusses DCI, and the state of Agile development.

It is interesting that JavaScript, with a prototype-inheritance model, satisfies Coplien’s desire for a non-class-based object-oriented programming language. JavaScript inherited its prototypal design from the Self language; Self can be characterized as a prototypal dialect of Smalltalk. There is also a Smalltalk project called Protalk, which is a prototypal extension of class-based Smalltalk.

In a prototypal language, taxonomy and classification of a classes is not necessary; in creating a new object, one merely constructs the object with the desired properties. One can create new instances that inherit the properties from an original model object; and one can differentially inherit or modify a new object’s properties as desired, at the time of creation.

Jim Coplien: Why DCI is the Right Architecture for Right Now
Interview with James O. Coplien by Sadek Drobi
at QCon 2010 London (May 29, 2010)
• Video (52 minutes) and transcript: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-dci-architecture

Handling architecture in the agile world
Jim Coplien at JAOO 2008, Aarhus Denmark.
• Video presentation: Not your Grandfather’s Architecture: Taking Architecture into the Agile World (47 minutes)
• Slides: Not your Grandfather’s Architecture: Taking Architecture into the Agile World

Doing OO the right way – Interview with James O. Coplien
Interview by Kresten Krab Thorup of Trifork, at JAOO 2008, Aarhus Denmark.
• Video (14 minutes): http://jaoo.blip.tv/file/1598213/

The DCI Architecture: Supporting the Agile Agenda – by James Coplien
Presentation geven at Øredev 2009 Developer Conference – oredev.org
• Video (52 minutes): The DCI Architecture: Supporting the Agile Agenda (November 6, 2009)

A few excerpts from the QConLondon interview:

The Smalltalk people, when they put together Smalltalk originally the computational model was exactly right, in terms of thinking in terms of objects. And then they screwed it up with the language. The language is so class focused! Most languages that we’re saddled with today had made this error.

I really don’t think that language constrains or shapes that much about what a great designer can express or does express. I think language is greatly overrated and we need to look beyond language for the solution. Language can help. Good languages can entice people and excite people and open minds, but it’s not enough. It really comes to changing world views.

Professionalism to me is that on a much higher level of how I am going to be responsible or answerable to society for the code I built. That has to do with a lot of thinking and a lot more than just technique can give me. This gets into morality. This gets into value systems. This gets into the systems thinking and for systems thinking you need to get beyond where we are with programming languages today. This is one of the reasons I’m excited about architecture these days. That starts to get us beyond the programming language limitations and into more systems thinking.

Procedural programming still has its place for some definition of procedural programming. If it quacks like an algorithm and flies like an algorithm, and it walks like an algorithm, I should be able to deal with it as a programmer, like an algorithm. That’s what DCI is about. It is restoring the identity of that algorithm while still honoring all of the principles of coupling and cohesion of the object paradigm.

So I’m trying to say “Let’s think in terms of architecture. Let’s think in terms of domain knowledge. Let’s think in terms of the mental models of the users of the system and the domain experts and do this at a level of systems thinking.” That perfectly complements the things that Bob [Martin] talks about most of the time.

Good interface design is really hard and there are very precious few people who are skilled in that in today’s world and we need more of these people.
Are you suggesting that usability starts from code that a programmer writes?
I don’t know if it starts at code but it stops at code. It involves code. Kent Beck used to say “You cannot hide bad code behind a good interface” and I totally agree with him.

Cited articles, people and topics mentioned in the presentations
• The DCI Architecture: After 30 years of Model-View-Controller, the other shoe drops. Gertrud & Cope (2011)
• The DCI Architecture: A New Vision of Object-Oriented Programming
Trygve Reenskaug and James O. Coplien. Artima.com (March 20, 2009)
• Data Context and Interaction (Wikipedia)

Trygve Reenskaug Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
• Trygve Reenskaug is the inventor of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates data and its processing from presentation, and Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modelling OOram
• Trygve Reenskaug http://folk.uio.no/trygver/2009/commonsense.pdf
The second release of the DCI paradigm and BabyIDE. This report includes Squeak/Smalltalk example code with comments. (74 pp.)
• A DCI Execution Model Trygve Reenskaug (PDF)
• DCI – A new Role Based Paradigm for specifying collaborating objects Trygve Reenskaug.
• Video presentation (1 hour, 45 minutes) DCI: Re-thinking the foundations of object orientation and of programming Trygve Reenskaug. (November 6, 2009)

• Gerald M. Weinberg – Books, Articles, Interviews on Quality
• Diana Larsen, on the importance of co-located team members (Partnership & Possibilities blog)
• The New New Product Development Game Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Harvard Business Review (January–February 1986) (Complete copies of this article can be found on a number of university web sites.)

• James Coplein computer science publications, a bibliography.
   http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/c/Coplien:James.html
   DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, a project of Trier University and Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics.
• Jim Coplien work has included software architecture, design, and implementation in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry as well as at Bell Labs Research; he is presently associated with Gertrud & Cope.
• Pattern Foundations – James O. Coplien
Video: Pattern Foundations (52 minutes)
Presented November 12, 2010 at Øredev 2010 Conference

• “The tools and materials metaphor”

Useful to know, the Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center, Division of Resource Services (NOC-DRS) was prior to October 1, 2007 called the National Science and Technology Center.

Federal Water Quality Law Summary (BLM)

Chapter Eight: Oil Spills, Clean Water Act § 311, and the Oil Pollution Act
also (PDF version)

(tags: CWA section 311 OPA)

Chapter Eight: Soil Spills, Clean Water Act § 311, and the Oil Pollution Act
I. Introduction

The CWA and the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) include both regulatory and liability provisions that are designed to reduce damage to natural resources from oil spills. Federal laws aimed at preventing and responding to oil spills represent Congress’s reaction to dramatic incidents causing environmental damage. Following oil well blowouts and oil spills in the late 1960s, Congress added § 311 to the CWA.1 Congress then expanded § 311 in 1978 by authorizing the government to recover the value of lost or damaged natural resources from those responsible for a spill. In response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, Congress enacted the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990.2 The OPA amended CWA § 311 and contains provisions applicable to onshore facilities and operations, including those on Federal lands.

Section 311, as amended by the OPA, provides for spill prevention requirements, spill reporting obligations, and spill response planning and authorities. It regulates the prevention and response to accidental releases of oil and hazardous substances into navigable waters, on adjoining shorelines, or affecting natural resources belonging to or managed by the United States. Section 311 works in conjunction with the program provided by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) for cleaning up hazardous substance spills. CERCLA addresses releases of hazardous substances to all environmental media including water. Therefore, both CERCLA and the CWA come into play when there is a discharge of hazardous substances to waters. Even though CERCLA does not supersede § 311, releases of hazardous chemicals are more comprehensively addressed under CERCLA, so efforts under § 311 tend to focus primarily on discharges of oil.

A. Agency Jurisdiction

Implementation of CWA § 311 and the OPA is the dual responsibility of the Coast Guard and the EPA. The Coast Guard is primarily responsible for regulations and enforcement related to vessels and marine transportation, whereas the EPA is responsible for non-transportation-related facilities and onshore operations.

B. Waters and Pollutants Covered

CWA § 311 prohibits the discharge of oil into navigable waters, on adjoining shorelines, or affecting natural resource belonging to the United States in such quantities as are determined by the EPA to be harmful.3 “Discharge” is broadly defined as any spilling, leaking, pumping, pouring, emitting, emptying, or dumping of oil or hazardous substances.4 “Oil” includes oil of any kind including petroleum, fuel oil, oil refuse, sludge, and oil mixed with wastes other than dredged spoils.5 The EPA has determined that a “harmful quantity” of oil is an amount that, when discharged, violates state water quality standards, causes a film or sheen on the surface of the water, or causes a sludge to be deposited beneath the surface.6

The scope of CWA § 311 and the OPA is similar to the rest of the CWA (Chapters One and Six). It applies to all waters that are navigable in-fact, non-navigable tributaries, and adjoining wetlands. These provisions also apply to discharges into or on the waters of the exclusive economic zone, i.e. the zone contiguous to the territorial sea extending 200 miles from shore.7 Natural resources covered by CWA § 311 and the OPA include land, fish, wildlife, biota, air, water, groundwater, drinking water supplies, and other resources belonging to or managed, held in trust, or otherwise controlled by the United States, and state or local governments, Indian tribes, or foreign governments.8

II. Removal Authority

The OPA amended the Federal authority in § 311 to respond to spills. Prior to the OPA, § 311 authorized the President to respond to discharges of oil and hazardous substances, but there was significant latitude for private cleanup efforts by the discharger. The OPA amended § 311 to mandate the President to take action to ensure “effective and immediate removal of a discharge, and mitigation or prevention of a substantial threat of a discharge, of oil or a hazardous substance.”9 The President’s removal authority is primarily carried out through the creation and implementation of facility and response plans.

III. Planning Provisions

CWA § 311 mandates that the President issue regulations establishing procedures, methods, equipment, and other requirements to prevent discharge of oil and hazardous substances from vessels and facilities and to contain such discharges.10 The EPA has been delegated the authority to regulate non-transportation related onshore facilities, and the Coast Guard has the authority to regulate tank vessels, transportation-related facilities, and offshore facilities (such as platforms).

Elaborate planning provisions constitute the regulatory components of § 311 and the OPA. These provisions are aimed at correcting organizational difficulties experienced in responding to spills such as that from the Exxon Valdez. However, planning processes sometimes work better in theory than they do in practice. As Glicksman notes, planning may increase readiness prior to a spill, but it may also reduce decision making flexibility at the time of the spill.11

A. Facility Planning: Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) Plans

Non-transportation onshore facilities include those that drill, produce, gather, store, process, refine, transfer, distribute, or consume oil. This includes “any onshore facility that, because of its location, could reasonably be expected to cause substantial harm to the environment by discharging into or on the navigable waters.”12 These facilities must have a fully prepared and implemented SPCC Plan.13

An SPCC Plan must be consistent with the National Contingency Plan (NCP) and with Area Contingency Plans (ACPs) (discussed below) and contain the following information: 1) for a facility that had experienced one or more spills within the past year, a written description of each spill, the corrective action taken, and plans for preventing recurrence; 2) a prediction of the direction, rate of flow, and total quantity of oil that could be discharged where experience indicates a potential for equipment failure; 3) a description of containment and/or diversionary structures or equipment to prevent discharged oil from reaching navigable waters; 4) when it is determined that containment and/or diversionary structures are not practicable, a demonstration of the impracticability accompanied by a practical oil spill contingency plan and a written commitment of personnel, equipment, and materials to quickly control and remove spilled oil; and 5) a complete discussion of the spill prevention and control measures applicable in the regulations to the type of facility and/or its operations.14

SPCC Plans can be amended either upon order of the EPA Regional Administrator or based upon review by the owner or operator of the facility. The plans are required to be reviewed by the facility owner or operator at least once every three years or when there is a change in the facility’s design or operation.15

B. Response Planning: National Contingency Plan (NCP) and Area Contingency Plans (ACPs)

The OPA revised the contingency planning and response requirements and established greater control at the national level through the National Contingency Plan.

i. National Contingency Plans (NCP)

The NCP is the primary planning vehicle to provide for the efficient, coordinated, and effective response to spills. The NCP has been promulgated by the EPA (40 C.F.R. part 300) and as required by § 311, includes the following:

Assignment of duties and responsibilities among Federal departments for water pollution control and conservation and trusteeship of natural resources;
Provision for the identification, procurement, maintenance, and storage of response equipment and supplies;
Establishment of Coast Guard spill response strike teams;
A system of surveillance and notice to safeguard against discharges or imminent threats of discharges of oil and hazardous substances and to ensure earliest possible notice for response;
Procedures and techniques to employ in identifying, containing, dispersing, and removing oil and hazardous substances;
A schedule that identifies dispersants and other chemicals that may be used to respond to oil and hazardous substance discharges, and the waters where they may be used;
A system whereby an affected state or states may act to remove a discharge of oil or a hazardous substance and how the state(s) may be reimbursed for the reasonable costs of such removal from the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund;
Criteria and procedures to respond immediately and effectively to discharges or threats of discharges that pose a substantial threat to the public health or welfare;
Procedures and standards for removing a worst-case discharge of oil, and for mitigating or preventing a substantial threat of such a discharge;
Procedures for coordinating response actions among the various Federal response entities; and
A fish and wildlife response plan for the protection, rescue, and rehabilitation of fish and wildlife resources and their habitat.16
ii. Area Contingency Plans (ACP)

Area committees designated by the President to work with state and local officials must prepare Area Contingency Plans (ACPs) to enhance contingency planning and joint response and mitigation efforts. ACPs supplement the NCP by including more specific resource and response information for the specific area covered. Each ACP must include a list of requirements, including development of adequate means of dealing with a “worst-case” discharge and a description of areas of special economic or environmental importance, which a discharge might damage.17

IV. Liability Under CWA § 311 and the OPA

CWA § 311, as amended by the OPA, imposes strict, joint and several liability on any party that is responsible for an oil spill or the substantial threat of an oil spill in quantities that may be harmful to public health or the environment. The “environment” includes fish, shellfish, wildlife, public and private property, shorelines, and beaches.18 Every responsible party is liable for the removal costs and damages that result from the discharge.19 However, discharges authorized by a permit issued under Federal, state, or local law, and discharges from an onshore facility subject to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act are not liable under the OPA.

Defenses to liability are limited to proof that the discharge was caused solely by an act of God, an act of war, an act or omission of a third party, or any combination.20 These defenses are unavailable to a party who 1) fails to report a spill as required by law; 2) fails to cooperate reasonably with officials responsible for removal activities; or 3) fails, without sufficient cause, to comply with a cleanup order.21

A. Liability for Removal Costs

Responsible parties are liable under CWA § 311 and the OPA for removal costs incurred by the United States, a state, or an Indian tribe.22 Removal costs include the costs of removing an oil spill that has already occurred, as well as the costs of preventing, minimizing, or mitigating pollution from a threatened discharge. Liability also extends to costs incurred by any private party for removal in a manner consistent with the NCP.23

B. Liability for Damages: Natural Resource Damage

The OPA and CWA § 311 impose liability on responsible parties for damages. Any public or private plaintiff may sue to recover damages to real and personal property and loss of profits or earning capacity.24 Most relevant to the BLM is that Federal, state, or local governmental entities may sue for lost taxes or other revenues and for increased costs of public services resulting from an oil spill;25 and trustees of the Federal government or Indian tribes may sue for damages for injury to, or destruction of natural resources, including the costs of assessing the damage.26 As mentioned above, natural resources are defined as land, fish, wildlife, biota, air, water, groundwater, drinking water supplies, and other resources belonging to or managed, held in trust, or otherwise controlled by the United States, and state and local governments, Indian tribes, or foreign governments.27

The OPA requires the Federal, state, and tribal governments to designate officials as trustees of natural resources.28 If these natural resources are damaged by oil spills covered by the OPA, the trustee is authorized to assess the damages and develop a plan for the restoration, rehabilitation, or replacement of the resources.29 The trustee must assess damages in accordance with specific regulations.30 The trustee may seek to recover natural resource damages either by bringing suit in Federal district court against responsible parties, or by making a claim on the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. The amount of natural resource damages to which the trustee will be entitled is the sum of the costs of restoring, rehabilitating, replacing, or acquiring the equivalent of the damaged resources; the diminution in value of those natural resources pending restoration; and the reasonable cost of assessing those damages.31

C. Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund

The OPA establishes an Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund that is financed by a tax on crude oil and petroleum products. This fund may be used to pay the following: 1) removal costs incurred by Federal or state authorities consistent with the NCP; 2) costs incurred by trustees to assess natural resource damages and develop and implement restoration plans; 3) reasonable Federal administrative costs to implement and enforce the OPA; and 4) claims for uncompensated removal costs incurred in a manner consistent with the NCP or for uncompensated damages.32
___________________________
1 33 U.S.C. § 1321. back
2 Pub. L. No. 101-380 (Aug. 18, 1990). back
3 33 U.S.C. § 1321(b)(3). back
4 33 U.S.C. § 1321(a)(2). back
5 Id. back
6 40 C.F.R. § 110.3. back
7 33 U.S.C. § 1321 (c)(1)(A). back
8 33 U.S.C. § 2701(20). back
9 33 USC § 1321(c)(1)(A). back
10 Id. back
11 Glicksman, Robert. Pollution on the Federal Lands II: Water Pollution Law. 12 UCLA J. Envtl. L. and Pol’y 61. 1993. back
12 33 U.S.C. § 1321(j)(5)(B)(iii). back
13 40 C.F.R. § 112.3(b). back
14 40 C.F.R. § 112.7. back
15 40 C.F.R. § 112.5. back
16 33 U.S.C. § 1321(d)(2). back
17 33 U.S.C. § 1321(j)(4). back
18 33 U.S.C. § 1321(b)(4). back
19 33 U.S.C. § 2702(a). back
20 33 U.S.C. § 2703(a). back
21 33 U.S.C. § 2703(c). back
22 33 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(1). back
23 33 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(1)(B). back
24 33 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(2)(B), (E). back
25 33 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(2)(D), (F). back
26 33 U.S.C. § 2702(b)(2)(A). back
27 33 U.S.C. § 2701(20). back
28 33 U.S.C. § 2706(b). back
29 33 U.S.C. § 2706(c). back
30 NOAA issued these regulations in 1996. 15 C.F.R. §§ 990.10-990.66. These regulations provide that natural resource trustees can consider both “active-use” and “passive-use” losses in assessing natural resource damages. Active use is the loss of actual use of the resource while passive use is the loss suffered by those who have never used or intended to use the resource, but value its availability. back
31 33 U.S.C. § 2706(d). back
32 33 U.S.C. § 2712(a). back

For Information or comments contact:
Eric Hecox
eric_hecox@blm.gov

In DabbleDB terminology, a “category” is similar to a database table, with additional attributes unique to the DabbleDB database application.

A lookup category is a secondary linked category, connected to some primary category, constructed by the user. Using a lookup category can be a method to have data in a primary category entry’s field transformed, or translated into another value. A lookup category is DabbleDB’s version of a lookup table.

A lookup category turns out to be a frequent answer to a variety of questions appearing on this forum. There’s nothing particularly special about a lookup category, except that it is a required method to accomplish several kinds of active data mappings or translations within DabbleDB, for lack of another method to do so within the existing feature set. In a sense, every category linked to another category is a lookup category. As a linked category, using a link-to-entry type of field to make the connection, the desired field value is derived into the original primary category.

A lookup category permits the following:
• a text value to be interpreted as a number, perhaps for calculation elsewhere;
• or similarly, permits interpretation of numeric data as a text value, perhaps for concatentation elsewhere;
• enables deriving a second, third, or more values based on a single data entry value;
• permits revising a data conception using conditional-logic into a non-conditional conception, avoiding, for a fairly wide set of circumstances, DabbleDB’s lack of a conditional logic feature for data;
• conversion of a field of type “choice” into a choice-like field with the above translation abilities, while retaining most of the other attributes of the DabbleDB choice field, especially if using the “pages” data entry forms. A notable lack in such a conversion, is the inability to default a field to a particular value;
• and additional mappings of one value onto one or more other values.

A lookup category can be as small as one entry, and it can be large with hundreds or even thousands of entries.

Here’s a two-entry example, translating “yes” and “no” to numeric values. You could have your data entry form indicate “yes” or “no” for some easy data entry purpose, and behind the scenes, use the number in a formula, perhaps to multiply some number, where “yes” indicates no change in value, and “no” means zero out the value.

Text  Value
----  -----
No      0
Yes     1

Here’s a sketch describing how to convert from a checkbox field to a link to entry to lookup category.
Questions » Use Check Box or Choice as a number (March 2009) Http://dabbledb.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3241

Here are a variety of examples that build on that illustrative sketch.

Questions » How can I deduct from a field depending on a status (December 2009)
Https://www.dabbledb.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=12922#p12922

Questions » Complex “IF” or “Case” formula? (February, 2010)
Https://www.dabbledb.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3976

Questions » Force Invalid Entries (March 2010)
Https://www.dabbledb.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=13242

An example of a large lookup category relating to dates:
Creating an index of weeks based on a date field’s value (May 2010)
Https://www.dabbledb.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=14011#p14011