CodeFutures News and Commentary Blog

New SQL Server JDBC Driver

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:58:00 +0000

Microsoft has at long last delivered a new version of its SQL Server JDBC Driver, with support for JDBC 4.0 and SQL Server 2008. The license looks complicated, but if you're using SQL Server then you're probably comfortable with Microsoft's licensing anyway.

Recommendations for JDBC Drivers for SQL Server most be one of the top 10 customer support requests sent to CodeFutures.

Big Red

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Big Blue pulled out of acquiring Sun due to the size bonus payments for executives. Larry Ellison has no such problems with huge bonuses and swooped in.

So now we have "Big Red", as some industry commentators are now calling Oracle (expect lots of headlines about the Sun setting ....).

So Larry gets his hands on Solaris and Java - THE operating system and programming lanaguage of choice for the dotcom boom in the 1990s.

The hardware business will allow Oracle to get into the application and database appliance business.

By accident, Larry also becomes the biggest open source vendor. Any guesses for what he'll do with MySQL?

The Next 20 Years of the Web

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:29:00 +0000

Twenty years after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Wide, he has presented his vision for the next 20 years at the annual TED conference.

SOA and Software Pipelines Book Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Book reviews for Software Pipelines and SOA: Releasing the Power of Multi-Core Processing:

"Software Pipelines uncovers a new and unique way of software design for high-performance development. Where other methodologies and frameworks have previously been describing the problem, Software Pipelines is focusing on the solution. Simply put, Software Pipelines addresses the developer’s needs for parallel computing and uncovers the throughput offered by multi-core processors.”

— Filip Hanik, Senior Software Engineer, SpringSource, Inc.

"This is an essential read for any company and software developer serious about developing software that will survive scalability and longevity." Read more...

—Karol Blanchard, VP Engineering, Consumer Health Advisers

“There are some books that tout vision but provide no pragmatic, hands-on details. Software Pipelines and SOA offers a does of both. Isaacson is an authority and practitioner, who understands that the promise of SOA is not fulfilled simply by embracing an architectural style of loosely coupled, network-based services but in how the applications and services that support this architectural style are developed and deployed. This book will help support a pragmatic approach to SOA.”

—Dan Malks, VP, Partner Engineering, JackBe Enterprise Mashups

“Isaacson offers a fresh approach to componentize and parallelize software applications in a way that is easy to debug and easy to maintain. Using the high-level abstraction of Software Pipelines, development managers need not worry about the complexities of concurrent programming or the challenges in dealing with maintaining threads, interprocess communication or deadlocks. Any software architect dealing with performance and scalability issues with complex transactional flows must consider the Software Pipelines design paradigm.”

—Venkat Pula, Field Application Engineer, Telelogic, an IBM Company

"This text is a leader in [software pipelines] technology. With domain expertise and strong background in implementation - this technology will pave the road for years to come. It is current now and will be applicable for as long as businesses are interested in scalable, distributed computing."

—Nicole Nemer Ph.D, Software Consultant

“Multi-core computing offers a unique opportunity to deliver dramatic scalability in modern business applications; but the task is not an easy one, presenting significant challenges to the software developer. Software Pipelines provides an easy-to-implement, concrete strategy that enables service-oriented applications to really deliver on the promise of this new hardware paradigm. A must read for any developer or architect stepping up to the challenge of high-performance business transaction processing.”

— Henry Truong, Chief Technology Officer, TeleTech, Inc.

Meet us at the Denver LAMP Meetup on the 4th

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:45:00 +0000

Are you in the Denver area this week? Meet Cory Isaacson on Wednesday at the Denver Lamp Meetup. Details here.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:10:00 +0000

An interesting wiki has been published with "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know". The articles were also edited and published in an O'Reilly book - although there's no real point in buying it since they are available on the wiki. The articles are very general, but it's still a surprise to see nothing about Enterprise Mashups or Software Pipelines.

Podcast on Delivering Real-Time Data

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:55:00 +0000

Phil Wainewright of ebizQ has conducted an interview with John Crupi on Delivering Real-Time Data that Users Can Act On where he discusses SOA and enterprise mashups. The text is available here and a podcast is available here.

Java EE 6 Overview

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:27:00 +0000

The Server Side has published an interesting overview of Java EE 6.

Java EE 6 is another big step in the journey towards the ideal of a simple, streamlined and well-integrated platform. Java EE 6 also includes a rich set of innovations best reflected in the technologies that comprise the platform including brand new APIs like WebBeans 1.0 and JAX-RS 1.1 or even mature APIs like Servlet 3.0.

Web Framework Comparison

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:45:00 +0000

JavaLobby has launched an effort to produce a Web Framework Comparison, including enterprise mashup platforms.

Gartner's Top 10 Technologies for 2009

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:28:00 +0000

Gartner has nominated its top ten technologies for 2009:

Virtualization

Business Intelligence
 
Cloud Computing 

Green IT 

Unified Communications 

Social Software and Social Networking 

Web Oriented Architecture 

Enterprise Mashups 

Specialized Systems 

Servers – Beyond Blades

As usual, the list contains broad concepts that are no surprise like "Green IT", some hot technologies like "Enterprise Mashups", and some cryptic references that required further reading of Gartner's material to understand. Sadly, no mention of Database Sharding, although the general area is covered well by Web Oriented Architecture - the driving force behind Database Sharding.

Career Survival Tips

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:21:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:09:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:07:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:01:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:42:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:10:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (CodeFutures) — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:53:00 +0000

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!