This is the second edition of one of the best books written on software systems architecture. If you are in the software development industry, you should read this book. If you are a Software Architect, you must read this book. Some might look at my book collection and think I have ho...

A great book of practical advice. The two things I like least about being a software architect is doing documentation and exercising social soft skills. On a lot of projects there comes a time when there is nothing I want to do more than explain to a business user why they are wrong. ...

This article will focus on Software Inventory Control Systems (SICS). Recently, I was asked by Bill Rogers (NH DoIT Commissioner) and Peter Hastings (NH DoIT Director) to take a look at SICS, investigate them and provide a recommendation. When I started this research I knew nothing abo...

A problem has come to my attention over the last few years and I thought Java.net would be a good place to talk about it. I have noticed that many reporting integrations use vendor-supplied examples verbatim. This is an issue. With JasperReports (the Java-based reporting tool), t...

This article reviews the features of Blaze Advisor, a business rules management system from FICO. Blaze Advisor helps technology teams maintain the business rules/policies separate from application code base and provides business users with ability to author & manage rules/policies in ...

This provides an introduction to the architecture style namely, process-centric architecture (PCA). PCA is suited for IT systems in the enterprise.

Every Software Configuration Management tool is different in terms of functionality; however, they all have common threads of functionality that are consistent with all Software Configuration Management tools. Common activities include checking out, checking in, adding files, deleting ...

I received an Amazon Kindle for Xmas. It wasn’t a surprise as I put it on the Xmas list my family insisted I provide. My wife had me order it with her credit card to make sure it was exactly what I wanted. The order was placed at the beginning of December to ensure it [...]

Yakov Werde has just written an article on DevX, which looks at the new version of Sybase's long running and successfull RAD development tool... PowerBuilder. 'A dormant giant gets a new lease on life as a .NET-compatible development environment.' I dont know if I totally agree with hi...

SAP (Business Objects) has recently released Crystal Reports for Eclipse version 2.0 to provide reporting solutions for Java-based applications. This is available as free to use (within an organization) and has the advantage that it is built on the most tested and reliable component (J...

So far I’ve remained relatively aloof from the whole “eBook” craze. Ordinarily, given my geeky background and borderline insane craving for technology, one would think that I’d be all over these things. The problem is, my love for the written word also extends to a love for the experie...

Robert Meek has written a book review about my Delphi 2009 Development Essentials, which is sold as paperback from Lulu.com, or offered as free bonus for anyone who purchases Delphi or one or more courseware manuals in PDF format from me.

NetBeans IDE 6.7.1 with JavaFX and JetBrains Web IDE Early Access are ready for download. In their own words here are some of the benefits these releases deliver. An update to the 6.7 release release that is integrated with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for developers to h...

Have you tried to prepare yourself for PMP certification or exam? If so, then you share with me the opinion that most of the PMP books and guides are remarkable of hundreds of pages that are full of hard to understand complex sentences that leave you by the end of studying day dizzy an...

Garmin International uses Enterprise Web Content Integration software that neatly integrates DMS and portal features, allowing enterprises to deliver "mashups" and a variety of value added applications such as CRM, ERP, online shops or product information to one single level

‘The Big Switch’ elaborates on Carr’s earlier comparison of the Electricity Generating industry, at the start of the last century, and today’s Computing industry. He argues that such a move, with its massive economies of scale, was an economic necessity at the time and that today’s tec...

Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online by Michael Miller is an excellent introduction to this phenomenon within the software industry. Written using a style that takes the reader on a gentle journey through a "brief history of comput...

The one thing that unifies the distributed computing style known as SOA, in most of its manifestations, is self-describing data via the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The benefits of XML over opaque message formats in data interchange are well established. No matter if your focus is...

Live Cycle Data Services is an excellent solution for building scalable RIA, but it’s not cheap. For those who don’t have a budget for LCDS, Adobe has released open sourced BlazeDS as a scaled down implementation of AMF. But BlazeDS is a lot more scalable than one may think.

Whether you work for a very large company with thousands of services in production or a small company with only a couple, visibility into the performance and uptime of those services is critical. Before you start investigating the myriad of governance products on the market, many of wh...

I took the advice of a friend of mine and steered clear of the 'normal' movie theaters and went a little out of the way to go to a DLP movie theater. The experience of comparing a regular movie theater to a DLP movie theater is like comparing standard def analog TV with a 1080i HDTV si...

There are 8,909 books listed on Amazon.com with the word 'Investing' in the title; there are(!) 27,146 books with the word investment in the title. Without having looked at a representative sample, I can be confident that Sturgeon's Law applies - I suspect if I sampled enough of them I...

This book is an update of an earlier version that was written for SQL Server 2000. It employs the Murach approach of dual pages that repeat and enhance the concepts being presented on each page. If you're new to SQL Server 2005 you'll gain a lot from this book. It has three goals: to t...

Reviewers overuse the phrase 'required reading,' but no other description fits the new book 'Ajax Security' (2007, Addison Wesley, 470p). This exhaustive tome from Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan places the specific security concerns of the AJAX programming model in historical perspec...

In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open s...

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like foc...

The Java development platform always provides limited support for application development based on a graphical user interface, an area where more traditional languages and integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Basic or Delphi have based their success.

The folks at Active Endpoints carefully thought through how to support users in their move to WS-BPEL 2.0. This resulted in the ability of BPEL 1.1 and WS-BPEL 2.0 processes to co-exist during design, test, and execution in both the designer and the engine. This lets users migrate thei...

Service-oriented architecture is an architectural approach to building software applications as a collection of reusable business services. Interest in SOA is growing within the business community. To address the need for an infrastructure to enable the building of service-oriented app...

Real-time data validation is one of the advantages of AJAX technology. By applying this technology, the struts validation framework will enrich the struts MVC and move the Web application closer to the desktop application. The validation framework is used to validate fields. There are ...

As the saying goes you never get a second chance at a first impression. In general, that's true, but if you've been thoroughly revitalized, matured, and cosmetically re-engineered, shouldn't you get a second shot at that first impression? I'd argue that's true of Oracle's Java/J2EE Wor...

An event-driven architecture (EDA) reflects the real world in which businesses operate. The real world is constantly changing, chaotic, and unpredictable. An EDA enables organizations to make sense out of all the events occurring within their business, and to detect anomalous business ...

Berkeley DB XML (BDB XML) is a popular native XML database. It can be accessed through the shell or within another program. This month I will show you how to use BDB XML in Java. BDB XML has similar APIs for all supported languages such as Java and C++, therefore the ideas presented in...

In terms of unit testing and code compliance, Jtest is a real heavyweight in the arena. For those who haven't come across Jtest before, it's an application that will analyze your Java application code for you. At present Jtest has 700 built-in rules and 100 security rules and it will a...

When MailReader - an example application bundled with the Struts Action framework - was created six years ago, most Java developers had yet to discover unit testing. Consequently neither the Struts framework nor the MailReader were created test-first. Since then, we've bolted a few uni...

By nature Web Services is a distributed technology. With distribution comes great flexibility for architectural topologies. Components can be strategically placed in different physical locations to optimize performance, maintenance and business processes. In large organizations one phy...

I recently had the chance to evaluate the next-generation Fiorano SOA Platform 2006 suite from Fiorano Software, Inc. As an architect and developer who's worked with previous versions of the kit over the last three years in addition to several competitor offerings, I looked forward to ...

Sharp tools make software development quicker and more productive. They automate manual tasks to speed development. They provide useful information intuitively to enhance productivity. Eclipse, the powerful and well-designed IDE, is such a tool. Few Java developers would want to return...

JasperReports is a valuable and viable reporting solution for Java Web applications. It simplifies report generation through the use of XML report templates that are then compiled using the JasperReports engine for use in reporting modules. These compiled report templates can be filled...

You can create a sophisticated application that implements complex algorithms, but in many cases you sell its GUI part to your users. The presentation layer of plain vanilla HTML/JSP-based Web applications is usually pretty basic unless you use specialized software. Today we are testin...