Columns
No extreme makeovers, please
 Enterprises are increasingly turning to service-oriented architectures and Web
services to rejuvenate their legacy apps, notes writer Alan Joch
in this month’s cover
story. These projects are not extreme makeovers, however, because these companies
still see value in their old apps. SOA and Web services allow them to expose their
legacy code as services that combine the best of the old and the new.
Stephen Swoyer
found developers were not at all ambivalent about Microsoft’s SQL Server
2005. Microsoft says that dropping Common Language Runtime into SQL ’05
will be a boon for enterprise developers because codejockeys will be able to
use the .NET programming languages of their choice. CLR is a run-time environment
that features a just-in-time compiler and built-in management services—with
the added bonus that (unlike Java) it’s language-independent. |
“This is not an improvement, but a disaster that threatens to destroy
data integrity,” says Joe Celko, author of several books about SQL Server.
The problem, Celko says, is programmers with no database experience will start
writing code in a wide range of incompatible languages, and because they don’t
know set-oriented declarative coding, they will convert an RDBMS into a 1950’s
file system.
Banks and other financial institutions are giving eXensible Business Reporting
Language a close look these days, with a push from government regulators, writes
Alan Radding.
XBRL is an XML-based standard for analysis, exchange and reporting of financially
oriented business information. Using XBRL is voluntary, but that may change
soon, Radding cautions.
Everyone wants to outsource development to India and other countries, but in
our ThinkPiece column this
month, Venkates Swaminathan, an expert on outsourcing,
says there are plenty of instances when outsourcing just doesn’t make
sense. Swami, as his friends call him, poses several questions you should ask
before you decide to ship your work offshore.
Finally, we’ve got a couple of stories on tools: one
story looks at tools to help you meet federal requirements for Sarbox; the
other looks at tools to help make sense of the huge volume of events that
security systems spin out in hyper-fast mode.
About the Author
Michael Alexander is editor-in-chief of Application Development Trends.