Thursday, November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving

  • I am thankful for my savior Jesus Christ.
  • I am thankful that he did not leave me in my previous unpleasant life.
  • I am thankful for the Church, the body of Christ.
  • The Church is my family and I love all of my brothers and sisters in the Lord.
  • I am thankful for freedom, purchased for me by so many people I'll never meet, at a cost I can only imagine.
  • I am thankful for my wife and family.
  • I am thankful to be upright and breathing.
  • I am thankful to be gainfully employed and able to provide a comfortable living for my family.
  • I am thankful for the honor of being called to pastor a congregation.
  • I am thankful that as I am learning to pastor "on the job", that my first congregation is not too large.
  • I am thankful for the interesting roles I have been asked to fill in the kingdom.
  • I am thankful for the favor that the Lord has given me in my city.
  • And lastly, I'm thankful that I have no more than two readers of this blog, so when I get too busy to post for a month, nobody is demanding their money back!

Happy Thanksgiving!
(And even if you feel like you have no possible reasons to be happy, just be glad that you aren't a turkey!)

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

The Stateless Web Not Harmfull

We've all done it. Every web developer worth their salt has complained about HTTP being a stateless protocol. And this makes web applications much more difficult to write. Waa waa waa, moan moan moan.

Stop and think for a moment. The early web was a distributed repository of information. This information didn't need state. In fact, if the HTTP protocol had included state, it would have made the early web a much more fragile infrastructure. As designed, for the purpose at the time, the web was very well designed.

Now, the advent of web applications did cause a challenge. The lack of state was a huge problem. But ... it's been solved. By using cookies, browsers and webservers layered a perfectly workable state mechanism on top of the underlying transport mechanism. I know that everyone had security concerns over cookies when they arrived. But browsers are more careful in their implementations of them and it's generally agreed that they're the only way to transparantly add state to HTTP, so everyone took deep breaths and calmed down.

And what a testament to the design of HTTP, that something unforeseen could be added ontop in such a straight-forward way. An awesome design.

So, can we all stop bemoaning that HTTP is stateless? Very clever people have figured out how to transport state over HTTP, so let's just get on with using it and making great web applications.