In-Depth Features


Tool talk

Quotes from industry luminaries

QA: Manes on mighty morphing services

Middleware expert Anne Thomas Manes has graced these pages before, most recently with an excerpt from her book “Web Services: A Manager’s Guide” [ADT, August 2003]. We caught up with her just before she held a webinar on the dynamic state of Web services platforms.

Do tools matter?

For 30-plus years developers have had a love-hate relationship with tools. Our experts offer their views on the state of development tools today and into the future.

Grid passes buzzword stage

Top computer makers, start-ups rush to build Grid technology and create standards they say can make “on-demand” computing a reality; are users ready?

Book excerpt: On model-driven design

Development managers must carefully implement design paradigms that can link all facets of a project; fundamental understanding of the core design is key.

Best practices: Meta data integration

How you manage your meta data is even more important than what you use to collect it.

The next step for meta data: Application integration

Solving technical and cultural issues won’t be easy, but using meta data repositories for large app integration projects could provide huge benefits

Longhorn's Architecture

Longhorn is the next major version of Microsoft's Windows operating system for consumers. These architectural models show how everything fits together.

Software applications infrastructure: The “new middleware”?

What exactly should those developing solutions view as “middleware”? The answer lies in an understanding of how vendors are approaching the software stack as a means of implementing SOA.

About standards

The Meta-Object Facility (MOF) from the OMG is meant to provide a common basis for meta models.

What integration meta data should you collect?

A listing of the major types of integration meta data, as defined by Gartner Inc.

User story: At Fidelity

Fidelity Information Services' Nancy Landau describes her company's effort to have testers work more closely with enterprise monitoring teams to find process changes that could help bridge the gap between development and operations.

Standards emerge from BPM stew

Market share appears to be the choice over technology in the race to create a Business Process Modeling (BPM) standard; is bigger better?

User story: At EBSCO

Seeking a tool to help monitor its B2B and e-Commerce Web apps for security issues and system errors, EBSCO Industries, Birmingham, Ala., installed TeaLeaf Technology's RealiTea.

Rivals IBM, BEA set to reveal Java specs

Longtime rivals IBM and BEA have published three new jointly developed Java specs designed to increase application portability across their app server offerings.

Brave new performance management world

Developers want more immediate feedback on rogue classes and calls that diminish performance. IT managers want to know the health of the enterprise.

Modeling for .NET

When you first think of modeling, you might not think of .NET. But tools already support such methods, and a Microsoft design set alternative is brewing that will surely shake the software design tree.

App servers: Up from middleware

Suppliers take app servers to the next level as the technology aims to become e-business cornerstone; some fear feature list will grow too long.

Oracle compares evolution of app server, database

Thomas Kurian, senior VP of development in Oracle's app server group, sees parallels between the evolution of the app server and the database.

SOAP test: A guided tour

As developers look to SOAP-oriented Web services to do more, ensuring app quality becomes more difficult. Can test tool advances keep up?