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.
Tuesday 22 January 2008, 12:45 PM
Blind Faith
Cream of the press release pile today is the fact that leading made-to-measure blinds specialist Hillarys Blinds is using an innovative web-based shipping system to help speed deliveries.
Hillarys has a turnover in excess of £90 million and each week the company processes over 6000 orders and makes nearly 30,000 blinds. With this level of throughput, a reliable system to handle accurate booking and shipping details is essential.
See? Even blinds need technology. That’s “innovative” technology mind you.
Ah, bless.
Friday 18 January 2008, 3:33 PM
Should more web sites be able to integrate with my diary?
When I want to know what time re-runs of Ray Mears’ Extreme Bushcraft are showing on the ‘Dave’ channel I tend to use tvguide.co.uk - and one of the features of I’ve increasingly started to notice is the option to get more info on the programme when I click its live link. It also gives me the option to view YouTube videos of the same content and even allows me to add the programme to Outlook so I don’t miss it. Now, I’m a Mac user so I don’t know what Outlook is of course, but I like the idea.
Should more web sites be offering to sync with our standard ‘Office’-type apps then I wonder? Despite being Outlook-lexic (note to self: good one for Urban Dictionary) I click these links and it looks like a relatively small amount of code to get this task done.
Wouldn’t it be cool if my favourite football team’s fixture schedule from bbc.co.uk/sport was downloaded to my Palm Treo? Hey, they could even try and sell me live SMS score updates (I’m sure you can probably get this already anyway), but I’m from North Somerset so I support Bristol City – and there has to be a cut off point with these things. Sorry, come on you Robins.
We read all the time about Rich Internet Applications from the likes of Adobe, so I wonder whether this online/offline personal diary element is a part of the next generation of web design that we are likely to see? I asked a web architect pal of mine called Adrian Munn from Monochrome whether his work with Flex was incorporating this element of design and I got a resounding yes. His company has recently finished some work for www.siblu.com (one of the biggest consumer based booking systems to hit the leisure and travel industry) and the book online function does indeed synch with your diary if you complete a holiday booking.
What’s next I wonder? Will it be RFID tags on milk cartons that synch with ocado shopping lists when the contents are stale perhaps? Bring it on.
Thursday 17 January 2008, 7:24 PM
Does Yahoo! OpenID 2.0 support open up security concerns?
Did you notice that Yahoo! has supported the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework? OpenID (it says here) is an open framework that allows you to consolidate your Internet identity and thereby eliminate the need to create separate IDs and logins at all of the various web sites, blogs, photo-streams and profile pages you may visit.
OK competition time. If any number of a users’ identities are brought together, what’s the first word that comes to mind?
SECURITY CONCERNS
Alright, so that’s two words – but you get the point.
This is just a public Beta of course, but it will mean that in addition to Yahoo! Services, anyone with a Yahoo! ID will be able to use the same ID for access to any of the 9,000 sites that currently support OpenID.
OK OK I may be looking for problems where they don’t exist. The official line on security is as follows. “Yahoo’s implementation is based on the OpenID 2.0 specification, which was finalised in December 2007 and includes new features that improve the security and usability of OpenID, making it the most user-friendly single sign-on and online user-authentication standard. Yahoo! users who log in with their Yahoo! ID on OpenID sites will have the added protection of Yahoo!’s sign-in seal wherever they go on the web, providing additional security and ensuring that no email or IM addresses are revealed or disclosed as part of any login process, protecting users from phishing or other attacks.”
So that’s alright then? Well, Yahoo! aren’t fools are they? In fact I’m quite a fan and have met co-founder David Filo personally. But if you Google (or indeed if you Yahoo!) the term “OpenID security concerns” you’ll get a list of blog entries from techies everywhere asking questions about security concerns for their own real world implementations of OpenID. A note of caution to end, this blog entry is not meant to be alarmist or deliberately negative – simply to make sure we do discuss these things before they get out of hand. Call it healthy discussion, call it typical British tech journo cynicism or simply call it wariness to knew ‘cure-all’ solutions in an increasingly security-aware world.
Wednesday 16 January 2008, 5:21 PM
Oracle, BEA and the big virtual Java adventure
So there I was reading up on Mr Ellison’s announcement this afternoon that, “The addition of BEA products and technology will significantly enhance and extend Oracle’s Fusion middleware software suite,” and I thought a little deeper investigation into BEA was appropriate. BEA clearly had their house and their technology stack well in order for the “suits” at Oracle to scoop them up, so what better excuse for a little tech update and a spin around their developer resources.
Not one to wade through more than my fare share of white papers I was drawn to some interesting content from a chap (sorry, a BEA Technology Evangelist) called Martin Percival who writes that there is up to 90 per cent of unused server capacity in your typical enterprise and that server virtualisation can unlock some of that potential by allowing consolidation of multiple applications onto fewer physical servers.
According to Percival, for every $1.00 organisations spend on hardware every year, they spend $0.50 on maintaining it. Now I’m not sure if that is an accepted fact, a rough approximation or a product of the company’s PR machine, but it’s for sure that the old “need more power, buy another server” technique no longer holds water now that data centre space is at a premium. Perhaps costs are so high as we are all being so inefficient, IDC recently reported that there is $140 billion of unutilised server assets floating around in data centres. Do they mean stateside or worldwide? Either way, it’s like, a lot, right?
“In many data centres, one set of servers is assigned to each application; so it’s tough to move server resources from one application to another; and hard to provision new servers and processing power to meet the demands of applications,” says Percival. The trick of course is to bring in the virtualisation layer that contains a virtual machine monitor or ‘hypervisor’ to allocate hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it. OK OK bear with me, nothing too ground breaking there yet right? But the next bit on defining the hypervisor’s form and function is good.
“However, the hypervisor layer traditionally sits above the hardware’s operating system, adding a layer of overhead. Hypervisors are typically small in relation to a full operating system and consist of a collection of device drivers, memory management and the logic to time-share the various stacks above them onto the hardware. In effect, a hypervisor is a stripped-down operating system in its own right. With traditional hypervisors, a function call inside the Java application has to go through more layers to be executed on an actual CPU because it still has to negotiate its way through the existing operating system stack before even reaching the hypervisor. The hypervisor’s swapping in and out of each application’s state imposes additional overhead.”
But it doesn’t need to be this way says BEA. By adopting a two-pronged approach to virtualisation, organisations can optimise the operation of Java applications in virtualised environments - enabling Java applications to run directly on a hypervisor in a slim and efficient hypervisor-optimised software stack
This theory suggests that this two-pronged approach is bottom-up; by enabling higher resource utilisation and performance at the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) layer when deployed on virtualisation-enabled hardware; and top-down by enabling automated provisioning and resource management with adaptive control for enterprise Java applications. This approach is, so we’re told, able to improve utilisation by reducing the resources consumed by redundant and unused functionality in the stack and can allegedly enhance performance by removing layers between the application and the ‘bare metal’ of the server.
How much you buy into this concepts is up to you – but rest assured that the salesman will hit you with the following three buzzwords: flexibility, cost efficiency and environmental friendliness. There’s definitely a green angle to be had here. As I type this blog there‘s a radio news report going out saying that the UK is wasting huge energy resources by all of us leaving our mobile phones, iPODs and electric toothbrushes (or insert electrical appliance of choice) on constant charge even when they are powered up - so it’s not hard to see how legions of under-utilised servers wastes more than just a little of the national grid’s output.
Tuesday 15 January 2008, 12:24 PM
Facebook’s faltering favours
Tom Hodgkinson writes in yesterday’s Guardian that he, “despises Facebook,” for its ability to socially disconnect people and chain them to their keyboards with a false sense of virtual social connectivity. “It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility,” says Hodgkinson. No no Tom, I’m right behind you.
Personally, the reason I don’t keep in touch with certain acquaintances from my past is that I don’t want to! As a previous member, after more than one fully grown adult contact had scribbled on my funwall (I’m sorry – I didn’t know I had one!) and poked me (or whatever it is) I just had to get the hell out of Dodge and delete my details.
Or did I? They’re probably still sitting on the Facebook central super-spy server somewhere.
Hodgkinson even eludes to what Facebook might really be if you buy into conspiracy theories and the all-seeing power of the CIA as it scoops up every bit of signal tracking technology it can get its hand on. He says, “Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius.”
I really wanted to post this blog as Facebook makes my blood boil. E-mail is just fine thank you very much for keeping in touch with as many people as I want. I’ll even go as far as Instant Messenger. I hear Facebook is blocked in Syria, if that’s true, then nice one president al-Assad.
You can read the complete piece at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
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