Public WiFi connections are often unsecured, leaving their connections open to being hijacked or “sniffed” by malicious people. To protect users from data and privacy loss due to insecure and untrusted connections, web sites and applications are increasingly being run entirely over secure connections (HTTPS).
My prediction is that by 2015, it will be bad practice to access web sites via HTTP, and users will increasingly demand HTTPS. This has interesting implications for hardware manufacturers and software development teams alike.
Paul’s points in the interview about making use of I/O completion ports on Windows highlights a key issue in cross-platform software development: Windows has some incredibly powerful and advanced APIs, which – if used directly – can provide huge performance benefits for software that uses them.
Web sites and web applications are increasingly using secure connections (HTTPS) for all traffic not just obviously sensitive data, as a way to guard against security threats. However, HTTPS requires encryption/decryption of data, which is computationally intensive. Web applications can therefore benefit from “offloading” the encryption/decryption processing required for HTTPS to specialised hardware devices.
There is in interesting discussion on Daniel Markham’s blog about the Tyranny of the Tools in relation to Agile software development. In a nutshell, “throwing so-called ‘Agile’ tools at development team does not make it Agile”; it’s the ways for thinking and learning which are truly important.
Matthew Skelton 