My experience is that an SOA has the potential to be cheaper and simpler. However, cheaper and simpler may not be the only value proposition.

Kontrawize says: "there is only something to gain with SOA for the parts of your software that genuinely have re-usable functionality, and are expected to …

It's about 10,000 lines of C. Much of the C is focused on "framework" issues -- logging, synchronization, parsing the parameters and that kind of thing. In this case, it appears to be 30-50% of the original C code is stuff that is available in Java and can be removed …

Michael Shermer's column, in the July 2007 Scientific American , "The Prospects for Homo economicus ", notes that we all impaired when it comes to making economic decisions.

Also, see Kathleen Melymuka's article in the July 23, 2007 Computerworld , "Boiling the IT Frog ". Harwell Thrasher suggests that simple ROI calculations don't work …

What I knew was this: I had a program, and I was supposed to make it work. I went to a meeting, the responsibility was duly handed off to me. "Alex has it mostly done, you just need to pitch in and help finish this by Friday."

Okay.

I listened …

Recently , I found out that my HTML parser was only a mere shadow Beautiful Soup . I invented what is -- essentially -- a similar core structure. I didn't carry it to the same level of completion. From what little research I've done, my invention predates Beautiful Soup.

It's one of those "collective …

TC writes:

I’m sitting in the corner, considering SOA from various perspectives:

• What sized company?
• When you sell/license the tech, what are you actually trying to sell? The initial implementation, individual services, ???
• Chicken vs. egg – implement first or align the culture first?

What is our company's approach?

Has …

The question seemed simple, which testing framework is the simplest? The situation is complex. There's a web application, there are developers and there are testers. The developers develop, and the testers test. So far, not so complex.

Here's the complexity. The testers are pretty focused on manual point-and-click testing. They …

Centuries ago -- it seems -- Jim Coplien facilitated a session for us at ChiliPLoP . Eventually, I figured out that patterns are a solution to a problem in a context which resolves various alternative forces, and has some understood consequences. Context - Problem - Forces - Solution - Consequences.

In this month's CACM, the article on …

See So What Are Requirements? in Dr. Dobb's.

I've seen requirements done badly. I've seen some notable failures of the use case technique: almost entirely because people refuse to actually apply the technique; they refuse to write use cases from the actor's point of view. I've whined about this before …

The Alex Handy story Study Predicts Upswing in Dynamic Language Use is old news, but when it's in a print publication like SD Times, then it starts to gain some traction. And it's one of those journalistic things: you can't repeat the obvious without some kind of "angle". And the …