You are enjoying a beautiful summer weekend afternoon relaxing in the park and then the chaos lets loose. Your cell-phone starts ringing, not the soft timbres of your favorite Sci-Fi show, but the Red-Alert alarms from Star Trek’s Enterprise. No, the Klingons and Romulans haven’t attacked, it’s the hot line from IT Support center. There are problems with a critical system that has stopped communicating. The problem affects the company both internally and externally; orders can’t come in, invoices aren’t going out and manufacturing doesn’t know what it should be building. Literally, this system failure may have just given everybody the day off, and you the opportunity to start a new career as a Sherpa taking rich adventurers up the face of Mt. Everest. Read more…
Camels can be stubborn and angry animals if you don’t take care of them. Lucky for you the EXTOL development team has figured out how to tame them. And we even taught them how to work with data!
Everywhere we look today we can see patterns. They’re in your shirt or tie. You witness traffic patterns (big or small) on your way to work. There are even patterns of integration – Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). These patterns allow you to define standard ways of dealing with messaging systems. Examples of these patterns include content-based routing and wiretapping. Read more…
My favorite part of building software is web development. I have been involved in building Web Services for EBI, Dashboard development for EEI and EBI, and I’m continuing to work on the web-based administration console for EBI 3x. A new project has cropped up where I get to do more web development. I’ve researched new frameworks that are available, and I’ve discovered that web development just got a lot more fun! Read more…
Tweeting… it seems that everyone is doing it these days. But, what are we tweeting about? Is it really useful, serving a valuable purpose or does it just add to the noise of the social arena within the Internet? Does it really change another’s life or perspective knowing that their friend is “sitting on his back porch”?
Recently, I was in a discussion with a colleague exploring the impact of mobile devices as a means of monitoring system operational health and activity. We cited the merits of having a smart-phone and being able to check on the status of a back-end system’s activity. We thought about the content that would most interest system managers: resource status, hung processes and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. Read more…
The EBI 3 team is pretty excited about using ServiceMix as a core piece of our server. This allows EXTOL to provide you with many different configuration options and a stable platform to deploy your projects into. This series of articles will acclimate you to the architecture and describe some of the tools we’ll be using. First, I’d like to you meet JBI.
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I started out expecting to write a blog on dashboards, but quickly found myself thinking in broader terms about user interfaces (UIs). Anyone that has spent just a brief amount of time in the software industry has been exposed to countless UIs. Stop and think about all of the applications and Web sites that you have experienced over your career. For me, it is easily more than 10,000. After 20-plus years, that’s a safe guess.
But, let’s step outside of “our software” and into the more esoteric realm of our day-to-day lives. We encounter many more UIs, as well. What about that microwave, coffee maker, your vehicle dashboard, credit card interface at the McBreakfast or even the security pad at the entrance to the office? They are all examples of UIs that we interact with every day.
So, let’s get it right out in the open: “The best user interface is no user interface at all.” There, I’ve said it. Now the heretical flaming can begin from the RIA pundits. I’ve heard it over and over through the years. However, it’s an interesting idea and doesn’t truly speak to an absolute magical way to control things (hint: that’s still an interface!) but to the notion of simplicity. Simplicity is the key to making a usable, understandable and productive interface. Read more…
In previous blog posts, we have discussed Eclipse and how we are using this platform for our Developer Studio in the next major release of EBI. This blog will focus on installing Eclipse, accessing its documentation, and installing a feature for Eclipse so that you become familiar with the environment for the future version of EBI Developer Studio. Even though many link Eclipse to programming, I will focus on the non-programming aspects of Eclipse so anyone can follow along.
With that said, we will tackle installation, which will probably be the hardest part of working with Eclipse. Read more…
Looking out my window, I can see fluffy clouds floating by. I find myself wondering how I would feel if I knew my applications and data were stored in some great electronic nebula, a cluster of computers far away, possibly scattered around the globe communicating through thin copper and glass connections. Makes you go…hmmmm.
Thanks for indulging my philosophical moment. Cloud computing is classically categorized into three areas: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS and PaaS have been popular for quite some time; just look at Google Mail (SaaS) and Salesforce.com (PaaS) for great examples.
I think that the real excitement is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). I had recently attended a Gartner conference on Application Integration and enjoyed a fascinating presentation by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, on how his company is not only virtualizing servers but also virtualizing relational databases and networks. Read more…
Switching the EBI Developer Studio from a homegrown client to using the Eclipse platform will require changing how EXTOL developers implement everything related to the GUI, including how to access help from within the product. One of the projects I was assigned to do for EBI 3x was to look into the Eclipse help system. I enjoyed working on that project because the Eclipse team did a fantastic job producing a very advanced help system that we will certainly be taking advantage of. Read more…
One of the reasons that we have chosen to use the Eclipse RCP framework for the next version of EXTOL Business Integrator is that it promotes modularity. A modular application is a system comprised of smaller, simpler parts (modules). As things grow in size and complexity this becomes necessary. Automobiles, for example, are modular, comprised of numerous subsystems — power train, exhaust, brakes, electrical, etc. You, in fact, are modular. This principle from nature has long been understood in manufacturing: that the best way to design and build a complex thing is to first see it as an assemblage of smaller, less complex (and therefore more manageable) parts. Divide and conquer. Modularity also makes possible the division of labor, the modern assembly line, and with it the move from a culture of craftsmanship to mass production and economies of scale.
Designing modular systems tends to require more thought and planning up front but pays huge dividends down the line. Not only are they easier to build, they are easier to fix and maintain. Consider the problem faced by the U.S. government in the 18th century in provisioning firearms to its army. Each gun was unique and made by a different gunsmith, so if a single piece broke the whole thing needed to be replaced or needed custom repairs. The government hired famed inventor Eli Whitney to address the problem, and he proposed replacing traditional methods of gun manufacture with a system based on the use of interchangeable parts. So, if a part fails, swap in another that is identical.
Unfortunately, too much software is still manufactured like an 18th century musket: highly-customized, one-off creations built by craftsman programmers (‘codesmiths’); handcrafted works that may be beautiful to behold, but are a real bear to fix and maintain in the field. Read more…