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.
Friday 30 May 2008, 12:31 PM
Friday down time: my fantasy technology dinner party guests
The weekend will soon be upon us and many of us will be gathering with friends and acquaintances to share a repast in the time honoured tradition of the dinner party. Although I’ll be attending one with relatives to feast on Chesapeake Bay crabs, I wonder who I would invite to my fantasy technology dinner party?
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Image source: Wikimedia
First to mind comes Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of One Laptop Per Child. Her work for the world’s developing nations endears her to many of us (not least myself, having grown up as a child in Tanzania) and her redoubtable persuasiveness would surely come in handy if a fracas were to develop among the other guests at any time.
To cover the programming purist side of things, I think Grace Murray Hopper would be a perfect guest. She is widely credited with inventing COBOL and naming bugs as, well, “bugs” – and as a Navy Rear Admiral in her own right, she’d clearly not stand for any nonsense between the main course and the cheese board.
Hedy Lamarr would have to come next. How many Hollywood screen sirens can you name that also co-invented something like spread spectrum encoding? After all, has Sharon Stone been working on new cloud computing techniques recently? I think not.
Ms George Oates the lead designer behind Flickr would also have to come along. George describes herself as an online application designer fascinated by the human condition and is a founding member of the team that built the Flickr photo sharing web site. You know you’re going to get a colourful person when you read someone’s bio and among her interests she lists ‘sunsets’. I’ve spoken to her before now that she’s under the Yahoo umbrella and I’m convinced that she’d be good for a good glass of Merlot or two.
Finally, VMware’s Diane Greene would probably be my most current guest. She’s quietly powerful, but in a ‘technology’ kind of way – rather than in a Carly Fiorina ‘do you like my shoulder pads’ kind of way – if you know what I mean. She’s also from Annapolis Maryland and that’s ten miles away from where my better half is from, so I’d make sure I also include my wife who is a mean Java software engineer in her own right.
Whoops – just realised, this is an all female list so far. So what would I serve these charming techno-leader ladies for dinner? Hungry Man instant microwavable TV dinners of course!
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Image source: Wikimedia
Thursday 29 May 2008, 12:27 AM
Die Hard 5: The Developer Bites Back
Gartner’s latest tenets on the subject of lifecycle management (LM) appear to have channeled the relatively widely accepted concepts of LM towards an additional acronym: namely IAM - Identity & Access Management. No surprise then, to find that Gartner has a ‘summit’ in the pipeline to champion the cause of this very topic this summer.
According to Gartner, “Reputational risk can arise from retaliatory or predatory moves by former employees or competitors in an increasingly volatile market seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in an identity infrastructure.”
My question is short and simple. Does this really happen to a measurable degree? Do outgoing disgruntled employees walk off with anything more than a few bags of paper clips of and more than their fare share of Post-it notes?
Perhaps it’s because I watched Live Free of Die Hard last night on DVD – the cyber terrorist at large is a hacked off hacker who wants to get his own back on his former employers who form part of the military security services (or something like that) so he tries to shut down the entire city, country etc…
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Photo: Fox Movies Japan
Yes application lifecycle management has to feature a good deal of security provisioning and this is closely related to testing and debugging and system stability. But the lion’s share of traditional ALM is about hitting development project goals and functionality requirements.
Security and testing as a whole are often argued to be rather more ‘baked in’ elements of ALM. After all, Borland acquired Segue for precisely this reason when it began its move towards ALM credibility. To set the discipline apart on its own almost sounds like repacked technology for the sake of extra publicity. To promote an analyst seminar series even!
Wednesday 28 May 2008, 2:45 AM
Seamless Saudi Software
As a former resident of the United Arab Emirates I’m always interested in what’s going on in the Gulf, especially when it comes to technology as my work out there was largely with the region’s largest technical publisher.
As such, it’s amazing to see what has happened to the Saudi Arabian government’s Ministry of Hajj ‘offering’ which it labels as part of its e-government, well, ‘offerings’.
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Photo: Morguefile.com
Not much more than a decade back, the Kingdom was ahead of itself by virtue of the fact that it ran just about the only train service in the Gulf. Pilgrims from the world over were pictured every year hanging onto overfull carriages for dear life on their way to their destination.
Today, they host nearly six million Muslims every year in the holy city of Mekkah (it doesn’t matter how you spell it – it’s a transliteration not a translation) and manage all the visa, accommodation and travel needs via their web portal.
While much debate still exists on whether the UK government has managed to achieve so called ‘joined-up-ness’, I wonder if there are lessons to be learnt from a ministry that boasts of ‘seamless information-sharing between government agencies’…?
This is the stuff of business integration software, business process management tools and portal integration software. Mentioning no names (because we’ve all got access to Google) we know that this is powerful technology – but it’s not perfect.
Not that Gartner’s word is the gospel truth (bad choice of word there – sorry), but they do have plenty of info on their site with pertinent titles like: “Six Challenges for Government Business Process Management” so it’s pretty clear that this is not a done deal and there’s plenty of debate still to be had around this topic.
Go searching around the web and you’ll see plenty of info on this topic too of course.
So do the Saudi’s have a corner on the market for perfecting the implementation of this kind of software?
I’m not at liberty to say your excellency ☺
Tuesday 27 May 2008, 1:08 PM
Cabin fever
I’ve just managed to kick a bad case of cyber dependency and survive for three days in a log cabin in Perry County, Pennsylvania where the most technologically advanced piece of equipment to hand was a 1.5 million candlepower torch.
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It was tough at first: no reception on my BlackBerry – no mobile phone signal – no laptop – no landline telephone – no TV signal, just a small mono radio that was able to pick up a single station that were clearly scraping by with one Bing Crosby album that they played over and over. In mid May, it’s hard to listen to, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”
With so little technical contact, I began to find myself marvelling at anything with a plug or a dial. The 1950s cooker suddenly seemed quite sophisticated, even with its broken clock & timer. The eight-track tape player in the cellar was fascinating, even if I couldn’t get it to play.
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Of course, somebody had spoilt it all and installed a microwave. So (with blogging in mind) just as I was about to start thinking about the embedded software inside it, I turned it on and was delighted to find that the light was gone and it really didn’t work properly anyway.
Strangely, the fridge almost had me for a moment. One of those vast American things that you could chill down a whole Ox in, it actually had a beeping unit that seemed capable of detecting whether the door had been open for too long.
I thought I was about to start feeling closer to a few microchips and then, there it was – a power cut. Superb stuff. Cue the candles, log fire etc… Then just as I was worried about my case of Rolling Rock (it comes from Pennsylvania don’t you know) getting warm – the power kicked back in. Phew!
I guess the moral of the story is that when I take a break, I do generally start looking around for things to write, blog or talk about – I’m really not that good at turning off. I’m all for the argument that software runs the world and touches almost every part of our lives. That’s probably why I spend so much of my spare time “trying” to get away from those concepts and immersed in the Discovery channel. But up in the hills for three days, I just couldn’t find an application for an application – if you follow me.
… and so it was, no technology for three whole days. Just myself, my wife, Smokey the Bear to look after the forest fires and the racoons and turkey-buzzards whizzing about in the undergrowth.
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But as soon as I had settled in and found myself loving the solitude and peace and quiet, out came that comment I had been holding back:
“Of course, I couldn’t live here without, well… y’know, satellite TV, well… and I’d need a wireless connection… and well, a proper mobile phone connection, umm… and, well, I guess I’d need a land line too – come to think of it, I’d need a lot of new DVDs or some kind of video-on-demand service. I mean, I’d just go mad up here alone in the woods without that kind of thing.”
Oh well, I tried. Honest.
Friday 23 May 2008, 2:52 PM
A blur between applications & content… really?
Am I the only one that’s wary of the theory that there is a so-called ‘blur between applications and content’ in the new world of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and web 2.0 technologies? The argument goes: interactive web 2.0 technology coupled with explosive rich media content is bringing everything closer together and this is a justification for greater use of application management and delivery software.
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Picture: EMI records
Yes application delivery is of paramount importance, especially with regard to web 2.0 and RIAs – but a clearly defined line still exists between apps and content… doesn’t it?
So, some vendors are trying to tell us that – hey, web application delivery is so complex that our integrated solutions can look after the application itself and all the yummy add ons like performance, scalability and security. Oh, hey – and cloud computing is around the next bend too and that’ll make things even more complex.
The raison d’etre for my ruminations are that I read comments this week related to the above by Citrix. A company that takes pride in saying that it is focused on the ‘first mile of computing’ i.e. the mile between the user’s computer screen and the door of the data centre. So I guess naturally they would like to suggest that there is greater proximity between applications and content.
The company just entered an agreement with Akamai (a web application acceleration and performance management player) to promote a new offering in this space.
With regard to the new announcement, Citrix president Mark Templeton (actually I’ve met him, he’s an open and up front decent sort of bloke) is quoted as saying, “Optimisation of the user experience will happen in the data centre, at the edge of the network and in the Internet cloud, allowing IT to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, security and cost savings possible.”
So that’s the other end of the mile isn’t it? That’s the mile furthest away from the user’s screen surely?
So is a blur occurring or not? Are they focused on the first mile or the last mile?
I spoke to a couple of independent developers about this issue this week and they both said things to suggest that Citrix might be scaremongering and trying to make it sound like traditional application development techniques are too dangerous for the new world of web 2.0 and RIA computing. In fact, some argue that the opposite is true and that development within J2EE or .NET environments (not to mention the new tools in the web services realm) makes things, if anything, easier.
I think I see two different messages here and I would certainly be sceptical about a company saying that applications and content are blurring. Anyway, a happy Memorial Day weekend to all.
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