"we have to (...) merge and leverage emerging and traditional tools to improve findability. (...) at the intersection of those two models is a more powerful framework for identifying, sharing, and finding information. The goal is a metadata ecology"
In denotational semantics and functional programming, the terms monad morphism, monad layering, monad constructor, and monad transformer have by now accumulated 20 years of twisted history. The exchange between Eric Kidd and sigfpe about the probability monad prompted me to investigate this history
February 17th, 2008 A 'problem' with the Mongrel/Rails platform A request comes in to the web server, and if it's dynamic, falls down to a waiting mongrel process. Mongrel calls Rails which wraps a big lock around most of the request/response cycle so the mongrel thats serving the request has to wait for a response from Rails to unlock and start serving other requests. This is the Blocked Thread stability anti-pattern that Michael Nygard talks about in Release It!. The problem is that Nginx or Apache doesn't know that a mongrel is blocked and keeps blindly sending requests. Thats means that even a single blocked mongrel will result in some slow responses for requests that come in to that same mongrel. Cut the Request Fat And one way to do that is to use the "Skinny Request, Fat Backend" principle. What that means in practical terms is pretty simple: Do as little as possible inside of the Request/Response cycle.