The Software Gorilla

The Software Gorilla

Archive for category Commentary

Research and Innovation and Enterprise Architecture

May 12

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, Enterprise Architecture, Exchange Web Services | 2 Comments

The thing that sets one business apart from another is the special added value that it brings to the table. It does something different. It has come up with an idea that no one else does quite the same way, or so the business believes. Even when someone else is doing exactly the same thing, the thing that differentiates the two is the way that they do it. This is the “special sauce” that makes a business special.

But how do companies go about finding that “special sauce?” And more importantly, what can they do to maintain it?

While I don’t believe for a second that all the special sauce in the world comes from technology, technology can often be at the very heart of making that special sauce, especially when we are talking about building customer relationships.

Technology can be a huge support in this area, and that’s where research and innovation come in. Using technology to build better business relationships is where the focus of technical growth is, and learning how to apply technology to do so is where research and innovation come in. [...]

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Tools of the Trade – Infrastructure and Process

May 9

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, Development, Infrastructure, Java, OpenEdge | No Comments

This post is a follow-up to my last post in which I spoke about the software that I use to build software. In this post, I want to talk about some of the hardware and operating system infrastructure that I have in place and the roll it performs.

As I said in my last post, I do not like to do work that could be automated. A large part of the work that should be automated is the work around the build process. More than anything else, successful software development depends on being able to produce a repeatable build process where the code that is built is thoroughly tested, installed and verified before it is considered stable. To get to the point of understanding how this all works, the hardware and network infrastructure is pretty important. So that’s where I am going to start. [...]

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Tools of the Trade – What I use for my Development Work

May 8

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, Development, Drupal, Infrastructure, Java, OpenClient, OpenEdge, Web Development, Wordpress | 3 Comments

Someone e-mailed me off-line and pointed out that I post UML diagrams on my blog fairly regularly. He wanted to know what tool I use for this. In the process, his e-mail reminded me that I had written a post back in March of 2009, where I said that an upcoming post would talk about this. Promises, promises!

Actually, now is a really good time to have this conversation because with the work I am doing on the Exchange Web Service code, I have just finished revamping my internal infrastructure to support the equipment and software I need to do the job. So this is going to be a two-part article. In this part, I’ll tell you about the software development components that I use. In the next part, I’ll tell you about the infrastructure components. The problem is that you need to understand some of the details of why, so I’m going to start with a little background.

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Data Architecture – Getting Back to Basics

May 5

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Business Architecture, Commentary, Data Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Information Architecture | No Comments

In a recent study by Forrester Research, they found that 74% of over 400 companies surveyed view data strategy as critical or very important, but only 17% of them had a mature data strategy in place.

When you consider that most enterprises are outsourcing a substantial part of their core business systems, it is frightening that they do not have a strategy in place. The result is that each of their vendors defines their own view of the data and the enterprise loses control of what happens with their application infrastructure.

In this article we will briefly look at what Data Strategy is, and then focus on how data architectural integrity can be maintained in the Enterprise Architecture process.

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What is Enterprise Architecture?

May 1

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Application Architecture, Business Architecture, Commentary, Data Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Information Architecture, SOA, Technical Architecture | 3 Comments

A question that I am often asked by colleagues and friends alike is “What is an Enterprise Architect, anyway?” This article is the first in a series of articles that will explain the term “Enterprise Architecture,” why it is important, and how each of the disciplines that constitute Enterprise Architecture relate to each other. Most importantly, this article is going to talk about how Enterprise Architecture needs to govern the processes around software development.

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Exchange Web Services – Subscriptions and Notifications

Apr 26

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, Exchange Web Services, Java, OpenClient, OpenEdge, OpenEdge AppServer, Web Development, n-tier Development | 10 Comments

It’s been a really busy week since I posted my first post on Exchange Web Services. I have learned a lot in that short period of time that I want to share with you. Whether you are an OpenEdge, Java or .NET developer, I think this post is going to have some information for all of you.

In my first post, I told you about the background story – I need to enable an OpenEdge CRM application to create, modify and delete calendar and task items in Microsoft Exchange. I also need Exchange to let me know any time a calendar or task item is changed so that I can update the OpenEdge database accordingly. Simple use cases.

When I left off last week, my next step was to get Exchange subscriptions working, and, boy, what a trip that has been.

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Exchange Web Services – Starting out

Apr 20

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, Exchange Web Services, Java, OpenClient, OpenEdge, OpenEdge AppServer, SOA, Web Development, n-tier Development | 8 Comments

A couple of months back, a gentleman who has now become a friend and business partner, came to me and asked me if there was any way to get at all the calendar items in his sales organization’s calendars with the intention of integrating it with his Progress OpenEdge CRM system. Jim is using Exchange 2007 for his e-mail and calendaring solutions.

I was aware that Microsoft had released a new API for Exchange in Exchange 2007 called Exchange Web Services (EWS), and so I said that I needed to do a little research on the API, but I was pretty sure that it was possible. Sure enough, MSDN has some documentation of the API and Microsoft is touting it as the replacement for all APIs that communicate with Exchange. Web Services – how hard can it be?

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Windows 7 and Google Chrome Browser update

Jan 18

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary | No Comments

It’s been a couple of months since I first installed Windows 7 and Google Chrome and although I had planned to provide an earlier update, things got pretty busy through December and I am only now coming up for air. So here, at last, is the long-promised update.

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Google Chrome OS vs Microsoft Windows

Nov 22

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary | No Comments

I was looking through all my favorite web sites for news on Friday evening when I ran into two news reports that I thought were very interesting. Microsoft showed up at their Professional Developers Conference in LA with a half-baked presentation about Internet Explorer 9 that just happened to make press the day before Google announced the release of Google Chrome OS as open source code. Is this a coincidence or an emergency reaction to the realization that Chrome OS could be a very serious threat?

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No, Ms Manes, SOA is NOT dead

Aug 12

Posted by Bruce Gruenbaum in Commentary, SOA | No Comments

This morning my RSS feeds had an update from Ms Manes’ blog again. She points to an article by Dan Woods of Forbes.com and says of his article that she is “pleased to see that Dan read beyond the first paragraph, and he understands the core message of my post (i.e., ‘SOA has been disappointing and that services should be a key focus’)” …
I wonder if Ms Manes realizes that she advocated exactly the same thing that Mr Woods advocated and then went on to slam the idea? In her original post she argued that the focus should shift from SOA to building services, and yet here she is arguing that just building services will result in fragile, expensive systems. Ms Manes is just flat-out contradicting herself.

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