Java George

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 business services, based on ported applications, to production. Here is where the fun begins. Such a simple statement, "deploy" it to production, except that in this new service-oriented archit... (more)

The Brass Ring

"Look, if I drink any more Espresso, my head will explode!" I am back at Peet's Coffee discussing job search strategies with Ying and Yang, the nicknames I have given to my two former summer interns. They are out in the real world now, and have decided to split from their current jobs at big, boring companies. Both are interviewing at Internet startups in Silicon Valley. For some strange ... (more)

Getting SQL Results From An Application Server

The way some people hobble their application servers, you'd think they considered the server as pointless middleware. Most Java developers, however, want to unleash their application servers to do right by their applications. "Doing right" in application-server terms means getting the stuff an application needs from various sources and delivering stuff from the application. When talking ab... (more)

The Grind

Potential Money The smell is everywhere nowadays in the Valley -money. Well, not REAL money, not the stuff that new Porsches and houses in Los Altos Hills are made of. This money is Potential Money, sort of like the concept of Potential Energy some of us dealt with in Physics 101. Potential Money is there in the form of unvested Stock Options. You Java hackers know -the reason you work the... (more)

JavaSoft Meets Its Karma

It was a tough day in the Valley. My mouth tasted like 20 miles of bad road, which is what my rear end was feeling as I drove up the winding road to Mt. Hamilton. High above the Santa Clara Valley, I was on a mission to see the Source of All Knowledge. The Chosen One used to be a consultant in Silicon Valley. On one fateful day, after a trip to Club Med, he was trapped in an airliner for... (more)