Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]
Thursday, February 4, 2010
There’s been lots of discussion the past six months about the fate of MySQL under the ownership of Oracle. Now that the purchase of Sun is complete, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the excellent JEE platform Glassfish. For example some people think that superior technology will prove to Oracle that Glassfish is [...]
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The science of the architect depends upon many disciplines and various apprenticeships which are carried out in other arts. His work consists in craftsmanship and technology. Craftsmanship is continued and familiar practice, which is carried out in the hands in such material as is necessary for the purpose of a design. Technology sets forth and [...]
I just released a new version of Money-Is-Money, v0.17. If you’re interested, see the features here and here. My aim with it is to make the most accurate currency-aware Java money handling library available. This time I’ve added just a couple of new methods to get the whole and fractional amounts as Integers (I use [...]
Thursday, November 19, 2009
An interesting Wall Street Journal article, “Why You Can’t Use Personal Technology at the Office”, came my way courtesy of a Linked In group discussion this morning.
In terms of the article, I agree it has been my experience for many years where I have faster/better personal technology than my workplace. At one place we had [...]
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Bob Lewis has a great column this month, “What if SOA is a mistake“? His penultimate paragraph asks:
Lost in the shuffle is something basic: Programmer productivity. Friends who are hands-on with such matters tell me the available SOA development environments are less than half as productive as products like PowerBuilder and Delphi were, back when [...]
I agree with Stephan, and Aldo; ORMs increasingly get in the way.
Collection mapping is one of those “hello world” problems. (The “hello world” example in the doco looks totally trivial and completely ideal [which is the problem], but suck-in-the-galaxy-greet-it-and-then-map-all-the-stars problem, which is more like what your real app looks like, is far less than trivial [...]
Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Coder Friendly’s got an interesting article about Agile Evangelism. First I’m not going to take issue with the article itself but something that he quotes from DanC’s Lost Garden on Managing Complexity:
The repetative (sic) steps that a single worker performs on an assembly line is a good example of a simple task
This is a terribly [...]
Monday, September 14, 2009
Peter Newton, “Director of Marketing” at American Express Australia Limited ABN 92 108 952 085, really likes Russian Mafiosa. Or maybe it’s Chinese Triads, bikie gangs, or maybe some local spivs operating out of a small rented smash repair shop near Beenleigh. Perhaps all of the above. Look at this email I got in my [...]