Java George

Old Joe here is cranking up his network. My current employer, once described as the next Netscape, is turning into the next Borland. My team is bailing out and I can't give them any good reasons to stay. Now it is my turn to pull the ripcord. It happens a lot. Company didn't make the IPO window, the promotion to director never happened after your beta test crashed "Byte Magazine"'s entire network, whatever. Blame it on Karma, blame it on Bill Gates, but it is time to move on. Got a call from two Java programmers I know. They are so different, I refer to them as Ying and Yang. Ying is always politically correct and unnaturally optimistic. Yang is a wild man, with so many body parts pierced, he can't go through a metal detector. Ying and Yang were working for me as summer interns a couple of years ago, and we stayed in touch since then. They wanted to meet. A good ... (more)

Avoiding The Web Application Front End Trap

Many developers are discovering that the front end of a Web application can be a dangerous trap. Sure, it seems simple at first: just grab one of the HTML application development tools and knock out a quick front end and connect to the tool's back end. This works well as long as the application remains a simple HTML application that isn't going anywhere. But, developers are quickly discovering that what begins, say, as a simple little intranet application becomes so popular that suddenly people are clamoring to put it onto the extranet, and even on the Internet where it can be a... (more)

Tower of Babel

I currently find myself on a consulting engagement for a large, multimillion-dollar, enterprise- wide Web services project for a major Fortune 500 firm. It's a golden opportunity to see first-hand the development of a bleedingedge enterprise service bus (ESB), complete with hundreds of Web services-enabled legacy systems and a sophisticated call center workstation front end. One of my responsibilities is to meet with all of the various application and system development teams across the enterprise and assist them in achieving the final goal, which is deploying all of the various... (more)

Do Clothes Make the Man?

Joe here again, still in the job search game. Seems like a bi-annual thing here in the Valley. Let's see, got the resume ready, the reference list completed. Oh, interview clothes; I need to think about that. A quick survey of my closet reveals a pile of clean Levi's, and a pile of dirty Levi's. In the corner is a stack of T-shirts with company logos on them. Other than fond memories or horrid nightmares, these T-shirts are my only reminder of the fluidity of employment in the Valley. A shirt from 3Com, given to me right before they took out half of the company on a restructuring ... (more)

Application Servers: Part 3

In this third and final installment of our three-part quest on application server inputs, we explore the role of distributed objects. (Note the IIOP/DCOM connectivity to distributed objects in the architecture diagram below.) There are plenty of good reasons for the application server to require access and communication with distributed objects outside its own framework. Indeed, the application server is an ensemble of distributed objects in and of itself, but there may still be external CORBA or COM objects that the developer wants to integrate into the application. The purpose... (more)