SHI
Opening Keynote | Mission-Critical Applications in the Cloud – Myth or Reality?
From the Editor
 There are a number of esteemed contests for the greatest and fastest software developers among us – events where we can pit our coding prowess against fellow brainiacs and like-minded techies. I think it’s high time we had an alternative set of awards, suited not to aspiring budding Tu...Aug. 3, 2009 02:45 PM EDT Reads: 4,658 |
 In Jef Raskin’s excellent book, The Humane User Interface, he discusses how the human brain is able to perform many tasks simultaneously while only having the ability to focus on one conscious thought at a time. Being able to process information and analyze it intelligently is crucial ...Jul. 9, 2009 01:30 PM EDT Reads: 5,608 Replies: 1 |
 Software testing while one of the most important tasks done in a development project is often misunderstood and abused by everyone from programmers and managers to testers. Wikipedia calls testing “an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the ...Jun. 10, 2009 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 5,683 |
 The software industry is often obsessed with progress be it in the form of a new language, wire protocol, specification update, or some other technology-driven feature. For me, software is a means to an end, and progress should be measured in features that allow code to be written more...Feb. 17, 2009 07:00 AM EST Reads: 4,534 |
 When a product a colleague worked on recently shipped its first generally available release, the event was accompanied by a marketing fanfare of podcasts, press releases, and conference trips to beautiful cities with boxes of presentation materials, branded lapel pins, and flashing fri...Jan. 15, 2009 06:00 AM EST Reads: 7,476 |
 Doing network I/O on the user interface (UI) thread is bad. Most developers know that and can tell you why; unfortunately, it’s still done. At this year's JavaOne, one of the keynote JavaFX demos bombed because the network was slow, something that would be forgivable had the entire app...Dec. 1, 2008 01:22 PM EST Reads: 9,062 Replies: 2 |
 At last year's JavaOne Chris Oliver gave a presentation on JavaFX in which he discussed how he was interested in programming Java2D not in terms of JComponent paintEvent methods that launch into graphics.drawLine(…) or graphics.drawRect(…) code, but instead by allowing the developer to...Oct. 15, 2008 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 11,390 |
 The finest programmer I've ever worked with told me recently that she was giving up coding altogether. The reason – a succession of inept and incompetent managers had just destroyed her faith in software development. Recounting her experiences over the past couple of years, she categor...Aug. 7, 2008 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 6,031 |
 Before Java I was a Smalltalk guy. I remember switching from one language to the other and the tipping point that you reach when you've mastered the new language and how many months it takes, not to mention the years, to do really good design and know-how, which patterns to apply and h...Jul. 26, 2008 10:15 AM EDT Reads: 21,738 Replies: 18 |
 Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company...Oct. 30, 2007 04:30 PM EDT Reads: 18,388 |
 In a recent presentation I attended, the speaker warmed up with a couple of bulleted lists that outlined the agenda of the session before moving onto his third slide that was clearly many days, work of stitching together powerpoint glyphs and figures in a sort of three dimensional loop...Sep. 11, 2007 06:45 AM EDT Reads: 23,165 Replies: 1 |
 A number of very significant development efforts are underway that bode well for Desktop Java's future. On the language side is the Java FX script project http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp. Java FX is neat because it provides a high-level scripting interface that runs on top...Sep. 5, 2007 09:45 PM EDT Reads: 43,091 Replies: 1 |
This is a short story about my friend (let's call him Joe). The last 15 years prior to his retirement Joe spent working as a mainframe programmer for a large financial firm in New York City. He stopped working at 67, collected well deserved retirement package and was looking forward to... Jul. 22, 2007 04:00 PM EDT Reads: 17,365 |
 Having attended two conferences in the past three weeks and seen untold presentations, I've come to the conclusion that irrespective of the subject matter, each presenter invariably falls back on the same technique to impress the audience: to rely on the skills of a conjurer or circus ...Jun. 21, 2007 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 15,428 Replies: 1 |
 The phrase 'not invented here,' or NIH, when applied to technology, describes a resistance by a group to use a perfectly valid solution to a problem they're encountering because they'd rather build the answer from scratch than adopt something existing that already does the job. Assumin...Apr. 25, 2007 09:00 PM EDT Reads: 18,402 |
 When the fast-paced, three-day program of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in the Santa Clara Convention Center finally ended earlier this month, with over 90 technical sessions and presentations from leading AJAX vendors like Laszlo Systems, JackBe, and Backbase as well as from established...Jan. 12, 2007 10:00 AM EST Reads: 36,951 Replies: 1 |
 As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10...Dec. 13, 2006 12:00 PM EST Reads: 29,015 |
 The question that forms the title of this editorial was recently asked by a young observer of the Web 2.0 scene, Skinner Layne, who contends that the key thing to determine about Web 2.0 is whether it is best characterized as a revolution in Web development or as a rebellion against We...Nov. 14, 2006 09:00 AM EST Reads: 24,232 |
 Since most any two words can and will be put together in this world, what with us being Homo Loquens and all, it's easy just to shrug when you hear new colloquies like 'social software,' 'social networking,' or 'social computing' and dismiss them as just three more inevitable permutati...Sep. 19, 2006 04:00 PM EDT Reads: 22,683 |
 I want back in the '90th...seriously. Ten years ago I didn't know Java: I'd been using PowerBuilder and was able to program pretty much everything in this RAD object-oriented tool. To find a job back then, all I needed to have on my résumé was PB, a single framework (PFC), and SQL. Wi...Aug. 14, 2006 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 19,576 Replies: 2 |
 I'm not implying that behind the mergers and acquisition news of every software company lies arrogance. I'm saying if you can't really afford to be arrogant, don't use the arrogant giants of your industry as your role model. If you analyze the successes and failures of the giants, you ...Oct. 28, 1999 08:30 PM EDT Reads: 114,589 |
