Earlier this year I heard Simon Fernandez, a cybersecurity researcher, give a talk on his paper "WHOIS Right? An Analysis of WHOIS and RDAP Consistency".

During his talk, he made an aside about the scattershot nature of the RDAP specifications and how hard it can be for one person to know where everything is documented. And it is a problem because he is not the only one to notice it.

Around that time I stumbled upon mdbook, which is the tool used to publish many of those fantastic Rust webbooks. mdbook is actually an ecosystem of open source software designed to make the publication of webbooks easier.

And so, wala! Introducing a free, open source webbook on RDAP, A Guide to the Registration Data Access Protocol.

It not only covers the specifications, but also has a quick reference to all the relevant RFCs and IANA registries and a list of all known RDAP software. Plus, it's a living document, can grow with time and need, and anybody can contribute to it.

I hope this helps all the future researchers, users, and developers who want to learn this rather esoteric topic, one that is likely to become more important as the Whois sunset approaches.

Eight years ago I wrote "Java will be the New COBOL", but that may have been more pejorative than COBOL deserves.

In Java is Becoming What COBOL Was - Will It Become What COBOL Is?, Mike Siemasz writes:

Some involved in the COBOL project advocated for abandoning design efforts and starting anew. Others criticized COBOL for its “semantic verbosity, its syntactical redundancy, and its overall lack of linguistic elegance,” Kurt Beyer writes in his 2009 book, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. The most insolent critics suggested COBOL would fail simply because women played a large role in its inception.

They were all wrong.

Eventually pushing past its precarious, underdog position, COBOL blossomed into the standard business programming language. Within its first decade, it was being used globally more than any other programming language, and it has lived long past its anticipated expiration date, being widely taught to new programmers throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s as a leading-edge technology, being core to ‘90s computing as the world prepared for Y2K, and remaining essential today as the underpinning of the world’s largest, most complex and most important applications.

Yeah.... maybe I should not be dunking on COBOL.

Ok, that's not exactly what I meant either. In my post eight years ago, I used data to predict that Java would soon start dying. Today, we have data that it is.

We've now reached a point in the lifecycle of server-based web application architectures where the hot-stuff that came about during and even the generation after the dot-com bubble is considered "legacy". Application-component containers are no longer necessary; virtualization has moved to a point where we have OS containers. Browsers have reached the point where they are the application, and the need for HTML templating and server-side session state are more trouble than they are worth.

Oh Joy! Another JVM Language

When you manage large projects with a lot of developers, one of the considerations when picking technologies is how well your least-skilled developers will be able to master them. That's right, I said "least-skilled". Therefore when the whole polyglot thing became fashionable and a new JVM language was being created every other week, I had to weigh each request to try a new language against how badly it would be put to use. And should I have to replace people!! It's already hard enough trying to hire competent Java developers... assembling an army of Clojure/Scala/whatever devs would be impossible.

So when Kotlin came about, I didn't even bother to look into it as I had no need for another language in my current technology stack.

But times are a changin'.

Given all the recent disgust with the big social networks, you may have heard some people talk about an alternative social network that is run by thousands of individuals and not ruled by one single, big company -- a social network that is decentralized and split across thousands of independent servers all over the world. Here's the low-Earth-orbit view.