Sunday, December 7, 2008

SaaS?

Should you use SaaS (Software As A Service)?

Yes you can, if:
1. You do not have capital to invest in infrastructure
2. You do not care about data back up

I think SaaS is a great concept and most of it comes for free. But relying on something like salesforce.com or any other similar platform for storing your information, without enough back up plan, sounds risky to me.

What if the service goes down?
How do you take care of backing up of data?

Data backup is mandatory from conpliance perspective. So if you are using AWS or Google Apps, how do you accomplish this?

Comments & ideas weclome ...

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

IBM to make DB2 open source

Ran into this post ...

IBM's UK director says:

Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open-source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody...


It's so much relief to see a DB that is being widely used being (going to be?) made open-source.

Apache Derby is giving me lot of pains ...

Friday, June 13, 2008

ILOG taking Rules further

ILOG has come up with rules for COBOL. I came to know about this a while back, but ran into this post by Daniet Selman (ILOG JRules Rule Studio Lead).

The effort for rules extraction from Legacy systems have been in place for quite sometime now. Rules For COBOL approaches in a different way.

The advantage with this approach is that enterprises can divide-and-conquer their legacy modernization, incrementally externalizing their business rules from COBOL applications and moving them into the BRMS. They can continue to execute the rules as COBOL minimizing the disruption to their system infrastructure.


Interesting. Now gotta learn mainframe to check this out.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

SOA Consulting

Another one from Geek and Poke:



This is so true. Who knows better than this?

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Google Android has come to life

Android enthusiasts can now check this ... It is impressive and works pretty well in US market with high speed data connectivity for cell phones. Just have to see, how and when they roll it out in Asian market and then how effective it will be.

See the snap shots here.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

IT Failures

Some of the posts that I recently ran into. I do not think these are new findings, but probably good read for people out there.

1. 8 tips to avoid being IT scape goat
2. 10 reasons for IT failure

There is also a post which talks about the prevention plan - 5 ways to prevent IT failure. But I do not think the prevention plan really addresses the point of failures.

Probably, one of the critical items that is not addressed is PEOPLE. Corporates do have some processes and use them as selling points, but I still think that the industry is people dependent and first thing we need to do is staff the project with right skill set.

For people who are following the HP-EDS deal, I give you this (EDS' troubled legacy of failed IT projects) to read.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Making Java Easier

Shlomo Schwarcz's write up name Making Java Easier on TheServerSide is pretty interesting one.

Some highlights are:

The Java language itself is not the problem, nor the JSP syntax or the JRE API packages. It’s what’s around the language that makes it so difficult to step into.


He suggest simple deployment model, dynamic reloading of classes, a simple web server GUI console and a Visual IDE GUI designer.

Sure, it's a great system for professionals managing large projects but what if I just want a 20 page interactive web site? Why can't I simply write a Servlet or JSP or even a single Java class, copy it to the server and execute it?

The fact is that if you are not a Java guru, then it will be almost impossible to perform the simple task of visually designing a form in NetBeans and then deploying it to a Tomcat or Jetty server.


One interesting comment by Ron Grimes which I pretty much agree to:
For me, the biggest drawback to being a newbie to Java is feeling like you're not a "real" Java developer unless you speak fluently about EJB and all the garbage that came before you decided to jump into the stream. A lot of developers feel like, in order to learn Java, you not only have to learn what is current (frameworks like Spring), but you also have to learn how to maintain all the legacy frameworks that came before it. And, maybe you don't have to learn all that, but you feel lost on Java forums because of all the antiquated features of Java that fewer and fewer people are using, but everyone still talks about.


I agree to a huge extent.

1. It is a nighmare to port a EAR on to different App Servers like WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss etc especially when I am using data sources and JNDI lookups. I need to write all sorts of App Server specific descriptors.
2. The smallest of fixes in the servlet class forces me to redeploying the WAR again.
3. So many frameworks coming out(it is chaos) from all places and there is no standardization.
4. Cannot bank on one framework for long as it may be replaced by another one in less than an year


I hear Groovy/Grails a lot here ...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Free Software?

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Quick tip on installing SOAPpy on Python 2.5

While you install as per the instruction given, you will run in the issue as you see below:



Now, do the following to resolve it.

1. Open the file Client.py and make "from __future__ imports" line to be the first import
2. Open Types.py, Server.py and GSIServer.py and do the same
3. Run - python setup.py build
4. Run - python setup.py install

Now you can start writing your SOAP server and clients.

Happy hacking !

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Google bids to lose

Google has lost the wireless spectrum bid to Verizon, but the reality is that they were never in the game to win.

Read this.

Interesting and it shows the way Google not just focuses on business, but how they want to change the lives of people.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Quick questions on crisis management

What do you do when you have to deal with a mismanaged project? Here are the constraints:

1. You cannot rewrite the application because client is still strict with timelines
2. Unit testing was not done properly and a bunch of requirements were never coded
3. While fixing defects, more and more defects are getting introduced
4. Resources are not competent enough to handle all the technical difficulties and few of the good ones become heroes are are over worked
5. After being mismanaged, the senior management suggest to go on a 24x7 repair plan and completely over seeing their responsibility in having the project in this situation in the first place. This has resulted in people getting overworked, and resulting in stress

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Offshoring to grow 40% - Gartner

Gartner, in one of it's press releases, states that offshoring is going to grow more than 40% in 2008.

Gartner evaluated 30 countries on following parameters:
1. Language
2. Government support
3. Labour pool
4. Infrastructure
5. Educational system
6. Cost
7. Political and economic environment
8. Cultural compatibility
9. Global and legal maturity
10. Data and intellectual property security and privacy

Gartner’s top 30 locations for offshore services, by region, were:


Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay
Asia/Pacific: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine

Their region specific analysis says:
In Asia/Pacific, although positioned as India’s greatest challenger in terms of its potential scale, China fared poorly for language skills. China, India and Singapore all demonstrated strong government support for the promotion of their country as an offshore services location.

The political and economic environment remains a concern for many companies when moving work to offshore locations; in this area Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam all performed weakly.

My take

Good news !!! atleast for an IT professional like me based in India. :)

Gartner also reports that offshoring is going to grow more than 60%. This will require services companies who can cater to non-english client's requirements. This is tricky and will pose challenge to India. My comment can be challenged because, there is quite a lot of work done by Indian MNCs in Europe.

I am not sure if China or Vietnam is going to be a real challenge to India with the such big English speaking population. Added to this, we have around 2 million engineering graduates getting added to the talent pool. Considering that only 20% is employable in IT, we still have enough talent available.

Having said that, the issues that are going to bite us back are:
1. Infrastructure
2. American economy slump
3. Sticking on to different flavors of same old operating model and methodologies
4. Attrition

Bright Future For BPMS

Guest blooger Gib Bassett at EDM Blog writes about Gartner Predictions for 2008.

Gartner recently issued two “Predicts: 2008” reports highlighting their expectations for Enterprise Architecture and the Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) Market. Both recognize noteworthy and highly complementary trends reflecting the value of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), particularly Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) supporting EDM principles.

I do not have the financial muscle to purchase the report. Here are some snippets from Gib's post.
“Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2012, the BPMS technology market will subsume greater than 80% of the pure-play business rule technology sector (for example, stand-alone business rule engines).”[...]

Gartner goes on to make two final points worth mentioning:

“Due to the increasing need to model rules and business processes simultaneously, it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain separate rules and process repositories.”

And

“Enterprises need to understand the consequences of not managing rules and processes with a shared metamodel, as well as the effects this will have on their ability to create dynamic business models.”


Read more >>

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Is reuse an idea that’s too good to be true? The idea of "build once, use often" has a lot of appeal for enterprises, and, as discussed many times in this blogspace, the first and foremost return on investment to be gained from SOA. There has been a lot of buzz and money flowing into [...]

This article points to David Chappell's take on service reuse.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008