In order to talk about what goes in the database, we need to put the question into some kind of useful context. Weirdly, the question came to me in a context so twisted and bizarre that it's a little hard to sort out what -- precisely -- was going on. First, what …

A taxonomy of pipeline alternatives is a big, hairy deal, involving lots of alternatives. While your basic API methods are relatively few in number, each language and platform introduces new options. Without some focus, it's challenging to produce a big, fluffy description of all potential alternatives.

However, the interesting thing …

When I was a kid, reverse engineering a legacy application was a challenge. Tools were non-existent, and even a civilized practice like unit testing didn't really exist. Now that we have test driven development, I think we can apply this to reverse engineering the billions of lines of legacy software …

This is not a Python to the rescue story. This is a true, deeply horrible situation. I was rescued by a reframing technique I'll call Extraction.

First, the function had nested if's without enough else's -- the kind of thing that handles two of the four possible conditions.

if( a ) {
    if …

I find the value proposition for a Service Oriented Architecture to be agility and simplicity.

See Linthicum's Real World SOA blog postings, specifically "Core Value of an SOA... " Here's the interesting quote: "this does not mean that reuse is not a core value of SOA, but its value is much …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …