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 29 April 2008, 2:34 PM
Is extensibility giving you a headache?
Have you noticed how everything is scalable, extensible, modular, componentised and (yup, you guessed it) flexible these days? Not that it shouldn’t be of course, it’s just that it’s such a heavily emphasised facet of so much of the technology industry at the moment that you can’t stop yourself from wishing the vendors who talk about it would get over themselves sometimes.
We know that companies, industries, economies and even countries can experience exponential growth and that ‘provisioning for extensibility’ (I can’t believe I just said that) is important. So have arguments for computing efficiency such as virtualisation and cloud computing helped take the sting out this topic? Don’t get your hopes up – today we’re more modular than a bag of Lego bricks at a Tupperware convention (not sure if that analogy works?) if you get my drift.
I’m all for reusable code structures to speed up software development, but I question whether too much voice is given to application delivery devices (or controllers) that claim to be able to do the architect’s or administrator’s job for them.
A case in point is Zeus Technology, who says that its position in the industry is defined by the fact that its customers’ requirements for rapid and scalable delivery of applications have becoming increasingly more complex.
The company sells something it calls ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) – essentially this thing is an extensible (there I go again) application delivery platform that manages traffic by inspecting, transforming and load-balancing requests across an application infrastructure. It is, we’re told, the “only” software application delivery controller available on the market.
My point is this – remember when storage was more of a big deal? Your hard disk got full, you played around with 3.5-inch floppies and you quickly used up your 32Meg USB stick when you first got it. These days we’re not so worried about extending our storage capacity for growing data needs. Will we see a time soon when we accept that application delivery demands can spiral upwards and know that we are equipped to deal with those eventualities? Or will we always need to essentially extensible and exponentially extendable?
Friday 25 April 2008, 4:28 PM
Happy Anzac Day
In a small homage to the country I grew up in (well, one of them) I'd like to remind readers that today is Anzac Day. Of course, we all know that this day commemorates the involvement of Australian and Kiwi soldiers who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.
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But I'd like to use it to mention the programming work that goes on down under.
First of all, there's ZDNet.co.uk's sister site www.builderau.com.au/ - how can you fail to love the Aussie sense of humour when they call their storage section "snorage"...?
Second, I used to be editor of a magazine that started off life being called Australian Developer - these guys have a firm handle on national pride and the way they fit into the global development spectrum.
On that point - what better reason for keeping 24x7 follow the sun development teams going than a 12 hour time difference eh?
Lastly - and you may not like this - Australia is a unique microcosm in development terms. It's a 'first-world' English speaking market that is educated and fully trained up - so Microsoft did a large amount of the Beta testing for Vista down under as it is one ‘easy to monitor’ distinct region. Like I said, you may not like that point so much.
Anyway, time to throw another tinnie on the old barby!
Wednesday 23 April 2008, 9:48 AM
Big Blue BlackBerry Pie
I went off social networking some time back now; I put it down to already being listed on lots of websites and wanting to preserve an extra degree of anonymity. Not that there's much chance of that once you're listed in most of the normal places – www.192.com and the like have a lot to answer for!
With that thought in mind, I find it slightly perplexing to see that software development for enterprise-level social networking is on the up. Among the protagonists in this space is Research In Motion who has been pumping out native BlackBerry apps to give users access to Lotus Connections social software for business.
I'm not sure whether it's a strange move to go for Lotus' communication apps. I know they're supposed to be the most powerful – but then so was Betamax and VHS still won the day didn't it? I did use Notes for a year once when I was working for IBM in a press role. It wasn't necessarily the most pleasant e-mail experience of my life.
Anyway, what looks like being the crunch factor in whether these apps take off is whether the software engineers developing them can incorporate desktop level – wait for it – 'collaborative functionality' and actually share corporate information effectively. There's a simple cost-benefit analysis to be made here – do these apps improve decision making and help increase profits? If they do, we'll see them mushroom. Well, maybe grow at least.
RIM's CEO Mike Lazaridis has been quoted recently as saying that, “Organisations are embracing social networking tools to improve productivity and enable workers to find the experts and information within their organisations that can help them get their jobs done more effectively.”
That may well be a finely tuned quote from the corporate message set selection pack, but the only time I've really gone from BlackBerry to CrackBerry was when I did a heap of travelling to various developer conferences across the US last summer and used one to keep my sanity levels up and my inbox down. It kind of kept me out of the airport bars anyway which I counted a good point for personal progress!
With globalisation on the up, 24x7 communications an absolute reality and me trying to cut down on my intake of Miller Genuine Draft – maybe it's time to bake up some Big Blue BlackBerry pie after all?
Tuesday 22 April 2008, 9:33 AM
The pertinence of programmers’ patents
Patent considerations for software programmers occupy something of a unique place within the hallowed halls of the be-suited bureaucrats who pad the halls of the European Patent Office.
Really? Yes honest – it’s quite cool actually. Patents aren’t just stuffy old pages of diagrams for new inventions to replace the household toaster, they form a vital part of governing the Intellectual Property of that “next big idea” that your hobbyist programmer side is always threatening to pump out.
I wrote up a story some time back about this developer who had put together a system that operated “just like” the Easyjet booking system (or something like that I can’t quite remember) and he’d got it passed through as a new product even though it behaved in the same way as the system he had clearly used as his design template.
The judges ruled that just because the GUI looked (let’s say ‘tasted’ even to illustrate this) the same, he had essentially constructed something from scratch to produce the same end result. The judge extended the taste analogy, when he said that just because two chefs both publish a recipe for chicken soup, a similar end result can be arrived at by two different routes.
So anyway, let’s get current - Simon Davies, a patent attorney who’s also a spokesman for the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) has described March’s High Court decision on Symbian’s patent application as, “Further pressure for alignment between the UK and Europe when it comes to computer-implemented patents.”
The High Court judgment related to a patent application by Symbian. According to the UK-IPO (formerly the Patent Office), Symbian's patent application describes how in a computer a library of functions, which can be called on by multiple application programs running on the computer, is accessed. In particular, it provides a way of indexing these library functions to ensure the computer will continue to operate reliably after changes are made to the library.
Perchance, patents for programmers are a pertinent subject – n’est-ce pas?
Monday 21 April 2008, 11:48 AM
Duped by data de-duplication
Should software development specialists be familiar with all aspects of database related technologies? Most, I think, would argue that the two areas are inseparable – according to the majority of programmers I speak to (or know personally), they work alongside DBAs in their day-to-day roles for the most part. Sometimes though, I feel as if I am targeted with database-related news and other materials that would perhaps be better suited to a storage specialist.
A case in point is when I heard last week about IBM acquiring a data de-duplication company whose employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit. Data de-duplication focuses on a particular part of the storage industry concerned with eradication of redundant data.
Making the link here, Diligent (that was the company that got bought) develops data de-duplication software that integrates with server and storage infrastructures to reduce, so they say, storage costs in data centres with spiralling complexity.
With the mists clearing around cloud computing and virtualisation – the proximity for software engineering to, at the very least bear in mind, considerations like server consolidation, databases and storage to a greater degree become apparent. There’s a green computing efficiency angle here too for data de-duplication isn’t there?
Is there a new industry term on the horizon perhaps?
“Software programming for storage-aware application design”
Oh yuk – I hope not.
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