Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Futures

All Posts

Productivity before elegance

In this article, webservicespipeline.com discusses the rate of adoption of .NET compared to J2EE.  Its conclusions are quite suprising.  It seems that the rate of .NET adoption continues to grow at quite a rate, and puts usage on a par or slightly greater than J2EE.  It puts .NET success mainly down to increaded developer productivity and ease of deployment and management. 

This is signifiacnt for three main reasons:

  1. In the hard nosed business of IT software development, even with all of Microsoft’s woes, when it comes down to making business decisions, many IT companies still seem to make decisions based on rational criteria, and long term strategy and architectural elegance or portability don’t win out in many cases.

  2. There is likely to be a lot of new software developed for the Windows platform

  3. Mono is going to be a pretty important Open Source project

All Posts

Open Document Formats – XML to you and me

This is one of the areas I am going to be looking at so its good news that there has been a recent flurry of activity around it.  here are some of the more important links.  The debate was started by the EC report into this topic which is summarised...

All Posts

Daily builds.

Another link to Joel this time on daily builds another of my favorite techniques.  Many people rebel against the idea, especially project managers who like to see release schedules and milestones.  There is nothing in the daily build concept that contradicts good project management process however, its just that the progress towards milestones is tested daily, so that the chance of suprises are reduced and the dependency on key individuals is reduced.  Here is a snipit but please read the whole article if you develop and IT system, and take note that the concept can be applied to all types of development not just software.  I used the daily build concept on one of my projects and I think it was a great success.

Here are some of the many benefits of daily builds:

  1. When a bug is fixed, testers get the new version quickly and can retest to see if the bug was really fixed.

  2. Developers can feel more secure that a change they made isn’t going to break any of the 1024 versions of the system that get produced, without actually having an OS/2 box on their desk to test on.

  3. Developers who check in their changes right …

All Posts

Superb article about the meaning of Open.

Jonathan Schwartz writes another great article about what’s important about the word Open in an IT context, he does this by comparing and constracting Open Source with Open Standards.  he goes further by showing the great work Sun has done to create reference implementations of their J2EE standard, and provide tools to verify compliance.  He provides a few real world illustrations of how the difference affects real business decisions.

Definately worth a read.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040808#rewriting_history_and_vocabulary

All Posts

The Blogging Workflow

The blogging workflow. 

This is a very very nice summary of how blogs work by Roland Tanglao at Streamline, it complements my comments because it provides more details of some of the server side infrastructure:

1. Joe Blogger writes something and publishes it to his blog.

2. Joe’s Blog system updates his site’s HTML, updates his RSS file and sends a ‘ping’ message to the ‘Aggregation Ping Server’ indicating that his site has updated.

3. Search engines like Google and RSS specific services like Feedster, Technorati and PubSub periodically ask the Aggregation Ping Server, “Which sites have updated?”.

4. Since Joe’s site sends pings and has an RSS file and is easy to update frequently, Joe’s search engine rank is higher than a ‘normal site’.

5. Techie Teresa uses a program called an RSS reader to subscribe to Joe’s site. The RSS reader checks Joe’s RSS file for updates periodically (usually once/hour or once per day) and notifies her of Joe’s updates. Teresa no longer wastes time manually surfing Joe’s site. She just checks her RSS reader.

6. As a result, Teresa’s information flow is more efficient and she can monitor more sites in less time.

7. Joe Surfer (who …

All Posts

Understanding Microsoft

A lot has been written about the history of Microsoft.  This article reviews a new book that looks at Microsoft from the perspective of the changes that it has had to introduce and continues to push forward as a result of its legal difficulties and “evil empire” image.  The full article is worth reading but here are a few of the more interesting quotes:

“They need to get the outside world to learn to accept them without thinking that there’s something shady going on there all the time. That’s a very long-term process,” he said. “There’s an awful lot of cynicism out there. No matter what Microsoft tries to do, nobody’s going to turn around overnight and say, ‘Well, we accept them now as good neighbors.’ “

One of the best insights:

In simple terms, some of Microsoft’s critics might characterize the ongoing changes as an effort to shift the outside perception of the company from “evil” to “good.” But Slater said he doesn’t see it that way.

“I don’t think they were ever evil,” he said. “I think they were unable, or unwilling, to curb the zeal that was always part of the Microsoft culture.” He said the company …

All Posts

The power of the blog.

The Radicati group recently published a report titled

“IBM Lotus & Microsoft–Corporate Messaging Market Analysis” (June 2004), available at www.radicati.com/reports/single.shtml.

Its a truly awful report, as many people have commented.  It breaks all normal reporting rules:

  1. It does not compare like with like

  2. It commends Microsoft for the same things it criticises Lotus for

  3. It does not provide its sources

  4. It uses emotive language to commend Microsoft and Criticise lotus

I actually looked forward to reading it when I first heard it had come out because I had some concerns over Lotus Workplace and how Lotus Notes/Domino would transition to the new architecture.  However the report was so biased I ended up feeling much more positive about Lotus than I had before.  The basis for my change of view “IBM must be on to something with Workplace if such bad analysis is the only tool available to make Microsoft look good”.  I was also left even more uncertain over what Microsoft is up to with Exchange, as I have already blogged on here and here.

The last straw for me in this report was the criticism of IBM/Lotus over migration to Workplace and the commendation of Microsoft on …

All Posts

Red Hat goes from strength to strength.

I was talking with some senior guys from Red Hat last week about their potential move beyond platforms towards solutions.  We were actually discussing collaboration solutions.  There view at the time was that their focus was to take what was available in the Open Source community and productionise it.  Its interesting therefore to see them release an application server.  When you look at the potential though to address the collaboration market Red Hat would do well to consider packaging a solution for email, IM, document management etc.  At the moment they ship the bits, but the bits don’t make a solution.  If you look at a previous post about Microsoft and their, “integrated innovation”, marketting there is probably as much scope if not more to do the same thing in the Open Source world.  Start thinking Solution guys, you seem to have Platforms and Component packaging fairly well sown up.

All Posts

Linux and thin clients

eWeek reports that Wyse, (a long term user of Windows embedded technologies), is now moving into Linux in a bigway. “Linux has really grown, and has become 20 percent of the worldwide thin-client marketplace,” What actually suprised me was that the market share was so low, given that Linux seems...

All Posts

Interesting view on XML and the benefits of generic solutions

This article describes some of the characteristics of XML that make it so powerful  The bottom line is that its generic nature means that generic solutions can be created tat can be applied to all manner of different problems.  The example quoted is a tool that compares two XML files, produces an XML file showing the differences.  The article then goes on to explain how this generic tool might be applied to different types of problem.  Well worth a read if you are trying to get your mind around some of the things that will be possible in the future.  Reminds me a bit of Unix pipes!