developers

Can You Teach an Old Developer New Tricks? When SOA was declared dead there was a spate of articles and blogs on why the architecture “died.” Most pundits came to the conclusion that like many innovations it wasn’t the technology to blame but rather people. Architects lacked the skills to properly leverage SOA; business stakeholders failed to look at SOA as a strategic architecture, choosing instead to use it as a tactical integration-solving solution; network and systems’ administrators did not understand the unique characteristics and issues a well-designed SOA raised within the network and on systems; and developers were loathe to “reuse” and “share” services despite alternate... posted @ Thursday, June 04, 2009 4:07 AM | Feedback (1)

Are admins developers too? If they aren’t now then Infrastructure 2.0 may force them in that direction - and vice versa. My brother (yes, it does run in the family) has a degree in computer science which, by most definitions, makes him a developer. That’s the focus of most computer science focused degree programs, much to the chagrin of the myriad other IT-focused specialties like networking, security, and operations. Interestingly enough, he worked his way through college as a sysadmin and his first job out of college was as a sysadmin. And now he’s doing a little of... posted @ Wednesday, May 13, 2009 3:51 AM | Feedback (4)

Five Key Questions Developers Need to Ask before Starting the Troubleshooting Process Brother, can you give a developer a hand? As the topology of networks delivering applications becomes increasingly complex it becomes more and more difficult to troubleshoot problems, especially for developers tasked with figuring out why their “application broke” in production when it was working just fine thank you very much in “DEV” and “QA.” It is rare, after all, that the production environment – including all the moving parts – is duplicated in development and testing environments. It is already difficult enough for developers to track down problems due to the complex nature of application infrastructure... posted @ Wednesday, May 06, 2009 4:17 AM | Feedback (1)

True or False: Application acceleration solutions teach developers to write inefficient code It has been suggested that the use of application acceleration solutions as a means to improve application performance would result in programmers writing less efficient code. In a comment on “The House that Load Balancing Built” a reader replies: Not only will it cause the application to grow in cost and complexity, it's teaching new and old programmers to not write efficient code and rely on other products and services on [sic] thier behalf. I.E. Why write security into the app, when the ADC can do that for me. Why write code that... posted @ Tuesday, February 17, 2009 3:41 AM | Feedback (8)

You want what? To run where? Without THAT? The February issue of Dr. Dobb's has a lot of articles about cloud computing. That's not surprising, cloud computing is very much on the minds of many folks these days and it does affect developers as much as (if not more than) most IT folks. One developer had a very interesting perspective on the topic, and very clearly spells out what he does and does not want: I don't want to write HTTP and SOAP and REST and SimpleDB queries. I don't want to be squeezed into a browser and I most certainly... posted @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:23 AM | Feedback (1)

Silverlight 2.0 released, support for Eclipse included Silverlight, if you recall, appears to be Microsoft's answer to Adobe's AIR platform. Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0 today, as expected. Part of the big exciting news is that you can now code up Silverlight applications in Eclipse. Yeah, not kidding. I know, you just hit weather.com too and checked to see what the temperature was. But seriously, Microsoft is fully supportive of the Eclipse environment for Silverlight despite its own support with its own free tool, Visual Web Developer Express. I haven't checked out the Eclipse version yet, so I'll be interested to see it and hear how... posted @ Tuesday, October 14, 2008 1:19 PM | Feedback (0)

Three Web Application Vulnerabilities You Need to Know Via Hacker News and Peteris Kumins' blog on programming, hacking, software reuse and stuff comes the latest Google tech talk, this one on web application vulnerabilities and "how cybercriminals steal money". While Peteris and Google are targeting web developers with this informative video talk, it's a great resource as well for security folks as well as network administrators tasked with understanding how to thwart web application attacks. Even if you've deployed a web application firewall to protect you from these kinds of vulnerabilities, it's still a great idea to watch this one and get a better... posted @ Friday, July 18, 2008 12:52 PM | Feedback (1)

A queue is a (a) line (b) a pony tail (c) a data structure Neil McAllister @ InfoWorld has a great blog post on The Web development skills crisis. He postulates at that "The most agile developers, however, are those who approach programming with a firm grounding in computer science." Amen, brother. Say it again, only this time loud enough my son hears you. The basic premise of Neil's post revolves around the frenetic rate at which programming technology is changing. It isn't just languages, though that is certainly part of the mix, it's also the increasing number of libraries and frameworks from which web developers can choose to develop web applications. In order to... posted @ Monday, July 14, 2008 8:31 AM | Feedback (11)

iRules: Unifying REST Access Methods In researching the MySpace deprecated API exploit I came across the details on MySpace's REST (Representational State Transfer) API. I'm going to ignore the debate surrounding the definition of "high REST" versus "low REST" and concentrate on the bridging aspect, as it's something I've already touched on and find to be of more value than worrying over what it's called or whether it's a standard or whatever else might be the focus of these arguments. You may recall that part of the problem with a true REST implementation is that many browsers do not support PUT and DELETE.... posted @ Friday, June 06, 2008 9:02 AM | Feedback (0)

If You Have to Ask What the Big(O) Is You've Never ... Calculated It I recently made a passing remark about the value of being able to write the code for a linked list. The night before Don and I had been arguing with our oldest son about whether he should be using a stack or a linked list to implement a Java version of Freecell, hence data structures had been on my mind. Because he, like many college students (and graduates) today, hasn't had the proper instruction in the basics of these data structures he's somewhat at a loss to understand why a linked list is, in fact, a better solution... posted @ Monday, May 19, 2008 4:53 AM | Feedback (2)

HTML Skillz No Longer 1337 Tech Republic blogger Toni Bowers discusses five high-tech skills that are waning as far as ability to command high salaries according to a recent Network World article. At the top of the list? HTML. Denise Dubie writes in the Network World article: As companies embrace Web 2.0 technologies such AJAX, demand for skills in HTML programming are taking a back seat. According to Foote Partners, pay for skills in technologies such as Ajax and XML increased by 12.5% in the last six months of 2007, while IT managers say they don’t see a... posted @ Friday, May 09, 2008 5:38 AM | Feedback (1)

Who Is at Fault for Poor Application Performance? I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was going to blame you. When the issue of application performance rears its ugly head like some kind of ancient dragon hell-bent on destruction (yours) it is often the application developer that ends up shouldering the blame. It's also often the case that neither the network admin or the developer can do anything to banish the evil dragon of poor performance. That's because sometimes the fault lies somewhere between the network and the application, in the murky middle layers of the OSI stack - above the network layers. ... posted @ Wednesday, April 30, 2008 5:52 AM | Feedback (0)

"Application Delivery" Role Missing "Delivery" Focus Like many people, I scour the Internet using Google Alerts that focus on keywords pertinent to my employer's business. Just this morning a digest from Google searching for the term "application delivery" landed in my inbox with an interesting job title: Application Delivery Support Analyst. My first thought was "Hey, that's cool!" I haven't seen such a title before and I got a little excited thinking that perhaps application delivery was finally coming into its own. Then I read the requirements and job description. Technical Skill sets Experience using SQL/ PL-SQL, SQLServer and Oracle to identify and... posted @ Tuesday, April 08, 2008 10:59 AM | Feedback (0)

All your performance are belong to us The evolution of programming languages and environments and the impact on performance Chances are that if I ask my son, a third-year computer science major, about Big(O) I'll either get that look - the one that says he's had that discussion with his father years ago and he really doesn't want to discuss such things with his mother - or he'll dismiss it as not relevant to today's computing environment. Big(O) and algorithmic performance is just not that important to today's generation of developers who are too often being taught to code within a vaccuum, or to be more accurate,... posted @ Tuesday, October 02, 2007 9:23 AM | Feedback (1)