Sean Rhody

Like many people in the industry, I'm torn over open source software. I'm not opposed to developers creating software and deciding they do it for the love of programming, and have no need for payment - if they want to give their work away, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to do so, although I think the people who want all software to be free should first get uniform agreement from everyone in the industry to work for nothing before they get on that soapbox. Even though I run a magazine in my spare time, I make my living designing software, and I personally don't want to do it for free. I'm not opposed to people who want to develop for fun, or for the pure joy of programming. Lots of students in college do this, and many hardcore programmers who don't get enough code during the day seem to grind it out after hours as well. Eventually though, the economics ca... (more)

SOA Editorial - A Little Help from My Friends

It's sometimes funny to write about service-oriented architecture. One of the things I say often and believe is that you can't buy a service-oriented architecture. SOA is not just technology, it's philosophy, organizational change, and business transformation. There's no place to buy that kind of dramatic, deeply impacting change. The funny part, at least to me, is that you can, however, buy or acquire a good deal of infrastructure to set this up from a single source. In the industry, we call that a platform. And that's what this month's issue is about - SOA platforms. Service-... (more)

They Might be Giants

One of the frustrations of editing a monthly magazine, as opposed to a daily newspaper, is that I seldom get to scoop the rest of the press. With our lead times, breaking news is more or less old by the time you hear it from me. So by now you've heard that Corel has merged with Inprise, maker of my favorite IDE, JBuilder. Corel has been quietly positioning itself as the new challenger to Microsoft's monopoly on the PC desktop. Capitalizing on the open-source revolution that is Linux, Corel has brought forth several different offerings to compete with Microsoft. There are a good... (more)

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect Edition

Web Services Journal received a copy of the latest visual development environment from Microsoft - Visual Studio .NET, Enterprise Architect edition. We loaded the software on a PC running Windows 2000 Server, with 384MB of RAM, but with a fairly slow processor (400MHz AMD K6-III). The recommended minimum is a 450MHz Pentium II class processor with 192MB of RAM under Windows 2000 Server, so this machine was roughly at the bottom of the capability range. Although our machine was somewhat underpowered, we're happy to report that Studio loaded quickly and was fairly responsive, even ... (more)

Adding A Middle Tier to Your Java Code Using Jaguar CTS

Two Tier vs N-Tier Client/server applications, and even Java applications that call a database directly, represent the original, two-tiered application architecture. This architecture fits many needs, but often there is a penalty - the need to redevelop or copy code from one application to another as it is developed. More importantly, although Java is certainly a significant language for development, it's a recently developed one, and much of the logic that we need to use is written in other languages. Distributed applications, be they Web applets or standalone applications, also... (more)