Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Wednesday 25 June 2008, 3:46 PM
Interesting archives and microfiche madness
To be honest I don’t find archives interesting do you? I remember my work experience job at 16 years old when I was despatched to our local government admin offices to work on their microfiche unit and, umm, write down stuff I think. That was the closest to an archive I’ve been for a while.
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Anyway, Forbes.com is apparently interested in archiving these days – more specifically, the topic in hand is email archiving.
IDC estimates the volume has increased from 9.7 billion in 2000 to 97 billion in 2007 – per day! Added to that regulation means that companies are now required by law to archive email. Finally companies need to be prepared for litigation and need to be able to comply with e-discovery orders.
I might think it’s as dull as a wet weekend in Wolverhapton, but it’s hot with the vendors too by all accounts. Proofpoint, a company that specialises in unified email ‘stuff’ (or solutions if you prefer) just snapped up Fortiva, a company that offers on-demand email archiving.
Just to clarify, this is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) so there’s development work to be done here – plus, this type of thing features a hybrid deployment model that, allegedly, delivers SaaS with the security of an ‘on-premises’ appliance. OK I’m starting to get (slightly) interested. So what are the key challenges in this space? Well, I’m glad you asked: email storage management, legal discovery and, thirdly, regulatory compliance.
According to Proofpoint’s web site, industry analysts have acknowledged email archiving as a ‘must have’ component of today’s enterprise email infrastructures. Record retention, electronic discovery and mailbox management may soon be terms that we are all more used to hearing then. I also hear that nearly a quarter of large U.S. enterprises were ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the past 12 months. Yikes!
As for me, cutting as pasting from Gmail into Mac TextEdit and then backing up to Lacie seems to have been enough for now.
Monday 23 June 2008, 11:49 AM
RIM’s Top Picks for Developers
Despite the fact that I find the most compelling aspect of the BlackBerry to be the retro-style “Breakout” bricks and paddle game, it’s for sure that plenty of people love them to bits. Madonna sleeps with one under her pillow by all accounts and my wife’s friend’s husband recently issued his spouse with a, “It’s the BlackBerry or me,” decree. Well, she’s from Kentucky – what do you expect?
Anyway, love them, hate them or harbour a passing indifference to them – the email-enabled PDA is with us to stay and we all know it. It does make you wonder why it’s taken RIM so long to formalise a physical meeting for developers on its device, but it has finally come about. The BlackBerry Developer Conference is planned for the week of October 20, 2008 in Santa Clara, California.
So what does RIM think is hot in the handheld space right now for software engineers interested directing their ‘next big thing’ towards the BlackBerry?
ENTERPRISE APPS - corporate developers should extend business systems to the mobile workforce says RIM. Let’s hope we hear the word ‘security’ plenty of times huh?
CONSUMER APPS – what exactly is a ‘lifestyle’ application then? Developers don’t typically use this term themselves so should we be wary? It is games, is it PIM, is it a travel planner and map. Alright alright I know, it’s all of those.
TOOLS – there’s a new BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) and a JDE Plug-in for Eclipse and Visual Studio.
RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS - RIAs will make a showing too apparently alongside AJAX, streaming video and GPS.
LOCATION-BASED SERVICES – you’d be worried if RIM hadn’t mentioned these, but they did. But we do seem to have been talking about them for years without really seeing too many of them emerge haven’t we? When will my mobile phone tell me where the nearest toilet is then?
OK, I was only joking about the Breakout game.
Wednesday 18 June 2008, 3:09 PM
Fighter pilots, periscopes and device software optimisation
You’ve got to admit it; nothing makes your brain feel numb more than terms like device software optimisation, or DSO to those in the know. It sounds like one of those vendor-created terms designed to sell us something we already have capabilities in, or can do with our existing toolset.
So why do we need it? We already have version control and change management software to help re-engineer desktop software to ‘devices’ in various forms – and if the software is being developed for a device from its first iteration then why should it need optimising in some special kind of way?
The BlackBerry gang at Research in Motion and Palm have been telling us for years about the various challenges of developing for ‘devices’ – you know the kind of thing: smaller screen, user input restrictions, limited battery life, slower processing power etc. Developing for these and other devices is different, so why do vendors like Wind River keep pushing the whole optimisation programme?
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Image courtesy of: Research in Motion
DSO has now, according to Wind River, encompassed multi-core software development and virtualisation techniques. The argument being that the ability to virtualise hardware allows multiple operating environments to share underlying processing cores, memory and other hardware resources. The company says that virtualisation presents the opportunity for device manufacturers to reduce hardware costs and power consumption as they add new capabilities to existing devices.
I think the problem here is what we mean by the term ‘devices’. It’s not just mobile phones, PDAs and other handhelds. The kind of device Wind River’s toolset would be used for could be a heads-up-display in a fighter pilot’s helmet or some kind of monitor inside a submarine periscope. Basically, this is the stuff of mission-critical aerospace and defense applications.
Maybe it’s just the way the term is structured that makes it feel uncomfortable. Wouldn’t DSO be better as Optimisation Software for Devices? It’s too late now I guess.
Monday 16 June 2008, 12:47 PM
What kills software creativity?
It’s a pretty solid argument isn’t it - there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. So, employing reusable code snippets and perhaps more fully blown widgets (into web-based applications) makes a lot of sense.
It is widely agreed that this practice does not negatively affect software creativity and, instead, it enhances the process as it allows developers to get on with the real job in hand i.e. creating something really new.
After all, why bother developing a currency exchange tool for your international trading application when you can ‘implant’ one from elsewhere. Equally, why bother developing a calculator – that’s comparatively simple.
Funny then that Microsoft a couple of years ago used a 12-year old Indian girl in its TechEd keynote to show how well she’d developed her own calculator using MS tools – but let’s not go there.
So what kills software creativity and will robots be writing our code in the future?
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Free image use sourced at: wikimedia commons
Look around a little and you might be surprised what people think. Software patents have come in for a hammering in recent times. The problem, as has been highlighted elsewhere, is argued to be that companies try to patent more than just the application itself and want to impose a broad-bush ‘sweeping’ patent that covers any application with the same look, feel and even general approach of the protected patent.
Will this crush upstart developers and stifle individual innovators? Some say it will.
So who is to blame? Is it the team leader and project manager? No – that would be too easy and that would just be blaming the boss – and we all like to do that.
Is it the customer? No probably not. They don’t usually even know what they want in the first place; so labelling them with the “culpable culprits” badge here is probably not appropriate.
I spoke to a few developers on this issue and believe it or not they lay the blame on themselves. Well, not quite – you wouldn’t believe me if I said that anyway would you? OK, they blame the user. Users stifle creativity.
Want to know why? Because they get used to the products they like and they don’t want them changed.
This is not a defence for the enterprise IT vendor who we will know will often push out new versions seemingly ‘for the hell of it’ (under the pretence that little and often is Agile iteration in motion and therefore a good thing)… It is instead a reference to what someone once said to me on the subject of legacy software.
“There is no such thing as legacy systems – there’s just software that works. The rest is new stuff that we don’t like yet and don’t know what to do with.”
I’ve been to too many conferences, meetings and lunches to remember who told me that, but you get the point.
So is creativity being stifled?
Here are some of the views expressed by one or two others I spoke to:
“Your outline touches on a trend I've been seeing for some time. An article in Discover magazine recently mused that software innovation is rarely found in open source software (OSS) projects. This isn't surprising, as often OSS projects are created to build copies of the features that people like from their favourite commercial products. OSS projects rarely invent something new - and if they do, it's often the genesis of a spin-off commercial enterprise. It's my view that people, companies and systems are generally inherently conservative - "if it ain't broke don’t fix it". A sensible view when you consider that our industry has been plagued by failed IT projects that were introduced in the name of progress but which delivered little or nothing.”
Dave Robertson, director of European operations for Perforce Software.
“It depends what type of developer you talk to but overall creativity in software development is not dead; in fact in most cases within the agency world it’s quite the opposite. The emergence of various services and open source libraries ensure that the developer, within an agency environment, can focus on the next best thing, the innovation. The mindset of a software engineer may, every now and again, want to be involved in binary manipulation but once the main parsing classes and algorithm has been cracked the rest of the task is menial. The best way of thinking about the libraries and vast offering of off-the-shelf packages is to revert back to the 80/20 rule: 80% of the work will be pre-completed but it’s the 20% which is the clever part, the magic.
Ben Jones, technology director, AKQA (the guys that developed the interface for the Xbox)
“Sometimes it's useful to think about what happens in other environments; let's take civil engineering. Now pretty much every time a new bridge is designed, it's different from every other bridge because the locality is unique, even if the designer doesn't want to use new materials or technologies. But to the user, a bridge is a bridge is a bridge. But we don't find bridge designers rushing into court complaining bitterly that some other guy's bridge has the same 'look and feel' as theirs. From a user's point of view, it always does, though. Maybe it's time everybody (but especially lawyers) got real about technological development. On the surface, any device designed for a particular purpose will probably look like any other such device. A Peugeot looks like a Honda. It's what happens under the bonnet that defines the engineering creativity and that's what needs to be protected.”
Robin Jones, education officer for the IAP (The Institution of Analysts and Programmers)
Wednesday 11 June 2008, 9:19 AM
Is the cat loose among the virtual pigeons?
Don’t be fooled into thinking that VMware is the only company that can create a song and dance over virtualisation at the moment. Certainly, its European and US-based VMworld conferences seem to draw in the virtual cognoscenti from far and wide.
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Free image source: wikimedia commons
But the cat appears to be somewhat loose now among the pigeons on the virtualisation conference bandwagon. Indeed, London town gets its own virtual shindig next January in the shape of the Virtualization Conference & Expo Europe. Yes, they used a Z for a UK event – oh well.
Organiser, editor and all round “let’s go and have a pint” man Jeremy Geelan, sent me an e-mail last week to let me know, “We have a strategic weapon: we're the Switzerland of virtualisation conferences.” Cue obvious jokes for fondue-roundtables, keynote yodels and sitting on the fence without really joining in.
Despite the rise of competing events such as this, the VMware engine room still appears to be active with news this Tuesday of its ThinApp application virtualisation product that the company said, “Lets customers run multiple versions of virtually any application on any Windows operating system without conflict. For example, users can run both Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 on the same operating system without disruption.”
Running with multiple versions of any Microsoft products in this way seems to suggest that you’d be asking for trouble – but I suppose it illustrates the point. According to VMware, this technology enables plug-and-play use of applications using an enterprise's existing systems and management tools. This means that the apps themselves are packaged into familiar formats such as .MSI or .EXE that can plug into existing infrastructures for license management, deployment and compliance.
In the face of recent reports by ZDNet.co.uk detailing the security challenges thrown up by the current drive to push towards virtual environments, analysts are still keen to put their name to the cause.
"Over the next two to five years over 50% of medium to large enterprises will adopt application virtualisation - to save costs, complexity and time to value throughout their desktop lifecycle. The ability of upcoming application virtualisation technology to work with multiple PC configuration tools is critical to reducing the overall complexity and realisation of true costs savings of packaging, testing and deployment of applications and desktops," said Ronni Collville, vice president, Gartner.
Essentially this is all about decoupling applications from the underlying OS and trying to make the environment they run in more flexible, while also maintaining control over desktops. VMware has said the “new” factors to look for here are its ‘Link’ and ‘Synch’ technologies that allow two virtualised applications to communicate with each other, while remote virtual applications can also be updated.
It’s all about virtualisation management then – and this is so much of the trend behind what’s being said by the conference organisers, the vendors, the analysts and probably the IT consultants (although I’m only hazarding a safe guess on the latter).
Vendors will tell you that it’s about defining your “technology roadmap” based on business needs rather than being constrained by application limitations – and this comes from the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know that virtualised applications do not suffer from limitations, change management challenges, interoperability or updateability issues.
On paper, it all sounds perfect. It’s still early days yet though surely?
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