CodeFutures News and Commentary Blog

Career Survival Tips

2008-12-02T15:33:00.002Z

It's a sign of the time when Infoworld publishes an article called IT survivor: 7 tips for career growth in tight times. Like most articles of its kind, it's interesting if a little obvious.

Agile Development Revisionist

2008-11-27T14:21:00.005Z

Any customers that have requested new features or bug fixes will know that CodeFutures uses agile development. The primary benefits of agile for customers are fast turnarounds on requests. CodeFutures' positive experiences are not uncommon - there's a massive amount of material written about the benefits of agile development.

That makes Brian Marick somewhat revisionist keynote address at the Agile Development Practices conference interesting for anyone deeply committed to agile practices.

Is Silverlight 2 Enterprise-Ready?

2008-11-20T15:58:00.002Z

Microsoft has released version two of its Flex-killer called Silverlight. Microsoft is pushing the technology for use in businesses - essentially for developing enterprise mashups and the types of interactive sites currently built using Flex.

It would be nice to compare Silverlight with Flex, but you need to agree to giving Microsoft "standard computer information" that seems pretty invasive:

Internet-enabled features in software will send information about your computer ("standard computer information") to the Web sites you visit and Web services you use. This information is generally not personally identifiable. Standard computer information typically includes information such as your IP address, operating system version, browser version, your hardware ID which indicates the device manufacturer, device name, and version, application version and your regional and language settings. In this case, the application version would be the version of Silverlight installed on your device. Silverlight contains an update notification feature that sends standard computer information to Microsoft.

Information that is sent to Microsoft by this software will be used to provide you with Silverlight features and services. This information may be used to improve Silverlight and our other products and services, as well as for analysis purposes. Except as described in this statement, information you provide will not be transferred to third parties without your consent. We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as packaging, sending, and delivering purchases and other mailings, answering customer questions about software or services, processing event registration, or performing statistical analysis of our services. We will only provide those companies the information they need to deliver the service, and they are prohibited from using that information for any other purpose.

Looks like the safest option is to check out the video demos on YouTube!

Mashup Developer Community Launched

2008-10-28T12:58:00.000Z

JackBe, CodeFutures' partner that provides Enterprise Mashup Software, has launched an Enterprise Mashup Developer Community.

As part of the launch, JackBe has started a mashup competition with $4,000 in prizes.

People are Computers

2008-10-25T17:09:00.002+01:00

The Economist today contains a Special Report on Corporate IT that says that the first 'computers' were actually real people who solved equations in large companies (for example, working in aviation). The term 'computer' only later described electronic hardware.

The same special report refers to a McKinsey report that says that only 6% of server capacity is used. This is hardly too surprising since enterprise architects need to design for peak loads and provide backups and failover. But the really surprising fact is that nearly 30% of servers are no longer in use - at all!

The Top 10 Things You Should Know About Flex

2008-09-29T13:51:00.001+01:00

Alaric Cole, the author of Leaning Flex 3, has produced a list of "The Top 10 Things You Should Know About Flex":

1. Flex is Web Standards, Redefined

2. Flex is Flash (and then some)

3. Flex Just Works

4. Flex is Server Agnostic

5. Flex is the Look You Want

6. Flex is Light, and Fast

7. Flex is Accessible

8. Flex is SEO-Compatible

9. Flex is Free, and Open

10. Flex is Easy to Learn

Item 10 is subjective - Flex is easy to get started with but like everything else, experience does count. Item 5 should be promoted to the top of the list - Flex-based applications can often look stunning. Item 9 is true as far as the SDK is concerned. And of course, the list does not mention how Flex fits in with enteprise mashups.

Optimizing the Slowest Thing

2008-08-05T18:07:00.002+01:00

Today’s InfoWorld Off The Record proposes that improving the performance of any application starts with optimizing the slowest thing. The stories are from 40 years ago. Nowadays, almost every business application uses a database and it is almost always the database that is the bottleneck. With the speed of multi-core processors, only exceptionally complex business logic could possibly take longer than even simple database reads or writes.

So that means that the rule “Optimizing the Slowest Thing” means database optimization. This is why CodeFutures is rolling out a free database performance analysis service, starting with MySQL.

The elements of the performance analysis are:

-MySQL configuration analysis
-Strategies for database reorganization and optimization
-How to perform database optimization without taking your application down
-Database size optimization (reclaiming unused disk space)
-Long-running query analysis
-Indexing strategy
-Reliability/availability/failover evaluation

CodeFutures has already developed a tool to gather the necessary information about a specific MySQL deployment. At the moment, the data analysis is manual. The tool will eventually evolve to include features providing immediate performance and configuration feedback. However, full analysis of the data requires someone with significant MySQL optimization experience - so there will always be a limit to what a tool can do.

You can your request free MySQL performance analysis here.

Dell Invents and Patents "Cloud Computing"

2008-08-01T13:31:00.001+01:00

The Industry Standard has posted in interesting story about Dell trademark the term 'cloud computing'. The story makes it clear that it's not a specific configuration or design - they want to own the term 'cloud computing' in general. While you can't blame the lawyers for not knowing any better, it means that there is at least a few technical staff in Dell that honestly believe that they invented cloud computing? And no, I checked, and the article is dated August 1st, not April 1st.

Microsoft Acquires DatAllegro - Customers Lose

2008-07-25T14:32:00.003+01:00

Microsoft has acquired DatAllegro. As well has creating problems for any DatAllegro customers that have avoided the Microsoft stack, the acquisition raises some interesting questions:

Why has it taken so long for Microsoft to realize that SQL Server does not scale well?

What will Microsoft say to DatAllegro's current customers that bought an open system based on the open source Ingres database and running on open source Linux?

Will the DatAllegro engineering team have to port its product over to .NET and how long will it take?

In addition to using Ingres and Linux, the DatAllegro engineering team presumably leveraged many open source products. Will these all have to be replaced due to Microsoft's stance against open source.

How will the DatAllegro's customers feel about the engineering team concentrating on a platform port that they probably do not want instead of delivering new features?

One fact is certain: the winners in this deal are DatAllegro's shareholders and the losers are DatAllegro's customers.

Our Software Pipelines Book is on Amazon

2008-07-08T20:05:00.002+01:00

CodeFutures' CEO, Cory Isaacson has written a book called Software Pipelines: The Key to Capitalizing on the Multi-core Revolution that is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

The book is published by Addison-Wesley Information Technology Series.

Oracle's Customers Paying the Price for its Market Domination

2008-07-01T15:32:00.005+01:00

Oracle appeared to demonstrate market dominance in the past few weeks with huge list price increases for much of its product range; annual revenue increases of 25%, helped by over $20 billion in acquisitions (including BEA, which has boosted Oracle to the number two position in the middleware market); and an IDC report that shows Oracle leading the database market and even increasing market share.

However, all three indications of Oracle’s market dominance are someone misleading.

Oracle has increased the starting list price of its flagship Oracle 11g database to a seemingly outrageous $47,500 per CPU. For new database development projects, Oracle is under huge price pressure from Sun MySQL, Postgres, and Ingres. These open source databases will have the same market impact as JBoss had in the J2EE application server market – no up front license fees and annual subscriptions for support and maintenance. This trend will be accelerated in the database market by Sun’s decision to aggressively price MySQL and provide generous licensing terms – unlimited CPU use for a very low fixed annual subscription.

So why would Oracle increase list prices in a competitive market?

Apart from the obvious ‘make higher profits’ reason for price increases, there has been speculation about the negative impact on Oracle of the fall in dollar exchange rates. However, industry commentary tends to ignore a key factor in the list price increases: while many analysts mention that most customers do not pay list price for new licenses so the higher prices are just written off as ‘discount, they fail to understand that the real commercial effect will be in annual support and maintenance renewals. Oracle has a huge customer base that automatically pays annual support renewals as a percentage of the current list price for its deployments. So increasing the list price has a significant impact on this revenue stream. It’s effectively a pay rise for doing nothing.

The license fee increases are also interesting because they go against industry trends like subscription pricing rather than up-front license fees, open source software development, and Software as a Service.

Oracle’s financial results are incredibly impressive – net income for the year was $5.5 billion, up 29 percent on revenue of $22.4 billion, up 25 percent. This great news for Oracle shareholders and confirms Oracle’s reputation for commercial acumen. However, it means that Oracle’s customers are paying premium prices and contributing to exceptional profits.

The database market share figures published last week by IDC are somewhat misleading because IDC does not include data on database usage by developers (a good indicator of future deployment trends) or even current live database deployments. The IDC survey is purely based on revenue estimates. This seriously underestimates the market penetration of open source databases, and MySQL in particular, which now has over 50,000 downloads per day.

So while June’s headlines give the impression of Oracle market domination, the stories overlook factors such as the unhappy experience of Oracle customers paying over the odds to contribute to bumper profits and the likely impact of Sun’s aggressive database pricing since its recent takeover of MySQL.

IONA Acquired by Progress

2008-06-25T14:01:00.004+01:00

It's been a big year for application development industry acquisitions - MySQL, BEA, Borland CodeGear, Cape Clear. It's now the turn of IONA Technologies, which has been acquired by Progress Software for $148.4 million. The acquisition follows a few false starts, including a bid from Software AG.

IONA's legacy CORBA product is widely deployed in the telecommunications and financial industries, although that can not be too attractive to Progress, which already has plenty of legacy products. Perhaps the encouraging results for IONA's new Service Component Architecture-based product called Artix influenced the acquisition?

The Good, the Bad, and JSF 2.0

2008-06-12T18:42:00.000+01:00

The JSF 2.0 Expert Group has released an Early Access Draft of the next version of the specification, and it’s looking ugly. While it would be all to easy to provide a long list of reasons why the new version of the specification is disappointing, it should be sufficient to point to the comments on The Server Side discussion to understand why CodeFutures will not be added JSF support to FireStorm/DAO.

The simple fact is that not a single FireStorm/DAO user has ever requested JSF support and there are technologies out that that are far more impressive such as Flex and some Ajax implementations.

Bringing SOA to the People

2008-05-28T22:10:00.001+01:00

The SOA Magazine has published an very good paper by JackBe's by John Crupi and Chris Warner called "Enterprise Mashups Part I: Bringing SOA to the People".

The abstact is here:

Forrester Research predicts that mashups will be a $682 million industry in the next 5 years. But can you define mashups? Can you describe the value of mashups to an SOA architect or even a business user? Can you outline the relationship between mashups and existing enterprise technology? Knowing the answers to these questions will advance you well down the road to embracing the concepts and techniques behind mashups in your organization.

This three-part series will help you get a head start by discussing the gritty details. In Part 1 we'll define a mashup in the context of the enterprise, contrast it against other common data integration technologies, and outline some of the more important architectural elements. In Part 2 we'll discuss why SOA architects should care about enterprise mashups. Finally, in Part 3 we'll discuss an enterprise architecture that incorporates mashups as part of your SOA-enabled ERP/CRM/SFA/BI and homegrown applications.

A PDF version is here.

Apache Tuscany Graduates!

2008-05-21T19:53:00.002+01:00

Apache Tuscany has graduated to full Apache project status today!

Andy Grove made considerable contributions to Tuscany SDO during the early days of the project.

Here's the reference written by Kelvin Goodson for the vote on Andy gaining committer status on the project.

Andy has taken part in SDO Java and C++ discussions since November of
2006, in particular in the area of the Community Test Suite (CTS). As some
of you may not follow this closely, I've distilled quite a bit of detail
from the lists to show Andy's participation. He ...

- been active in creating and resolving numerous JIRAs
- did some of the work of the initial drop of tests to the SDO Java
CTS from Rogue Wave and in the CTS infrastructure design, including ensuring
vendor independence.
- has discovered and offered solutions to a number of anomalies
between the CTS and the specification
- developed and contributed tests for testing XML schema choice
function.
- provided good insights to the required and permitted behaviours of
implementations when dealing with elements which are nillable
- has taken part in discussions for an M1 release of the CTS
- Initiated discussions on DataHelper formats wrt dates and
durations
- developed new test cases for spec section 9.10 -- XML without
Schema to SDO Type and Property
- solicited input from the Tuscany community with respect to the
equivalence or otherwise of null URIs versus empty strings, in order to
feed back to the spec group
- took a significant part in discussions of how to ensure the CTS is
test harness agnostic, and provided patches to update tests to assist in
this goal
- contributed a set of tests for XSD complex types
- provided support to the community with problems running the CTS
and with insights into new Junit features

Aside from Tuscany, Andy has been active in the SDO Java and C++
specification efforts, and I think he will be a great asset to the project.

Regards, Kelvin.

So well done to Andy Grove and everyone else involved in Apache Tuscany!

Some of the Best Code Generation Links

2008-05-15T12:42:00.007+01:00

Some of the best links on the Web related to Java Code Generation:

Code Generation Network
http://www.codegeneration.net/

JavaWorld: Reflection versus Code Generation
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2001/jw-1102-codegen.html

Applying Code Generation Techniques to the J2EE Development
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=389718

Wikipedia on Code Generation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_generation

Code Generation: The fastest way to write software?
http://www.softwarereality.com/programming/code_generation.jsp

Writing Code is Stupid
http://ianwij.com/weblog/articles/Writing_Code_Is_Stupid.aspx
Code generators help you deliver high-quality code quickly
http://techrepublic.com.com/5102-6329-5035011.html

Are you missing out on code generation?
http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/15511

Code Generation Techniques for Java
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/09/03/generation.html

Bug Prevention with Java
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/03/31/codeGen.html

Code Generation in Action
http://www.codegeneration.net/cgia/

Generative Programming and Component Engineering Conference(GPCE'08)
http://www.hope.cs.rice.edu/twiki/bin/view/GPCE08/WebHome

CodeGear Finally Sold!

2008-05-07T15:17:00.002+01:00

In what has to be one of the most drawn out sales in the application development market (the For Sale sign was hung out over two years ago), Borland has finally disposed of its IDE business line that is now marketed under the CodeGear brand. This includes the once dominant JBuilder IDE (a classic case study in the market impact of an open source competitor - in this case Eclipse). The CodeGear division was finally sold at a bargain basement price of $23 million to Embarcadero Technologies (a market leader in database products). It remains to be seen if the acquisition will result in increased product investment since Embarcardero is owned Thoma Cressey Brovo. Being owned by a private equity firm often means tactical pressure to produce profits to repay leveraged purchases rather than strategic product investments.

Forrester on Enterprise Mashups

2008-05-06T17:44:00.002+01:00

A new Forrester report predicts that the Enterprise Mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013. Most industry analyst projections for the size of markets five years out seem inflated, but in this case, it seems rather low. Enteprise Mashups will be the dominant architecture and de facto standard for building Web applications - so you would imagine that the total spend on Enteprise Mashups would be in the billions?

Java 6 for Mac OS X Leopard Released, Finally!

2008-05-02T16:32:00.002+01:00

Java for Mac OS X 10.5, Update 1 is now available from Apple through the automated Software Update service.

One thing to watch out for is that the release is only for 64-bit, Intel-based Macs - so you are out of luck if you have a PowerPC-based or 32-bit Intel-based Mac.

As regular readers of CodeFutures' blogs will know, we're becoming big fans of Mac hardware. So the long awaited Java 6 release for the Mac OS is very welcome.

Expect to see improvements to our Mac support in FireStorm/DAO soon.

New SDO Tutorial

2008-04-25T15:07:00.001+01:00

We have published a new SDO tutorial that provides a general introduction to SDO (rather than being product-specific).

Spring Versus EJB

2008-04-08T23:57:00.001+01:00

JavaLobby has published an interesting article on job trends for Spring versus EJB. It appears that the job market for Spring jobs - and therefore commercial Spring development - is accelerating.

install4j 4.1 Launched

2008-04-03T18:52:00.002+01:00

The new version of install4j, the installer used with FireStorm/DAO, is available. You can read about the new features here. ej-technologies has done an excellent job as usual.

Joe McKendrick on Selling SOA like Web 2.0

2008-03-27T18:54:00.000Z

Joe McKendrick has written an interesting blog about how much easier it is to promote the use of Web 2.0 technologies compared with rolling out SOA in organizations. JackBe figured this out a while back, offering a product that combines SOA and Ajax technologies to produce rich enterprise applications and mashups.

Spring DAO Support

2008-03-03T17:12:00.003Z

Spring DAO support and Spring MVC support are two of the main new features now available in FireStorm/DAO 4.0 BETA. This release is available for immediate download from:

http://www.codefutures.com/products/firestorm/download/

7 Mashups Every Company Needs

2008-02-25T19:06:00.002Z

Check out this list of 7 Mashups Every Company Needs:

Customer Service: Mashup your call center application with package tracking

Client Prospecting: Mashup your sales prospects with external news, stock and company information.

Human Resources: Mashup your internal job postings with external resume services
Competitive: Mashup your competitive position in the marketplace.

Community: Mashup your product defect tracking with code management, time-tracking systems and blog commentary.

Research Information: Mashup relevant Medical, scientific and Law research with your own internal data.

Decision Dashboards: Mashup your product specifications, revenue planning, and product information with other products in the market.

You can read the details here.