Perhaps Minnesota politician Al Franken’s character on Saturday Night Live said it best when Stuart Smalley declared “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” A good consultant is not just measured by their productivity, but by their professionalism and personality as well. Building a rapport with decision makers at clients [...]
In my previous two posts, I described my experience with maintenance and refactoring on a large project that used both Java and Groovy. In this post, I will discuss the installation concerns raised by Bill Burke in his blog post “Polyglot programming is the worst idea I ever heard”. In describing the “installation nightmare”, Burke [...]
A page layout using DIV’s are much more flexible than a table layout. However, I often went back to using tables because it seemed more stable across different browsers. After spending some time researching how to use DIV’s effectively, I came up with a list of basics I wish I’ve known before. 1. Is a [...]
In part 1, I described how my experiences using both Groovy and Java delivered business value to the customer by letting the project team work with code that closely reflected the domain. We found the new system didn’t result in a “maintenance nightmare”, but rather made maintenance much easier than if only Java had been [...]
My answer to Peter Ledbrooks’s blog post “Are polyglot systems a good idea?” is “Yes!”. He wrote his post after reading “Polyglotism is the worst idea I ever heard“ by Bill Burke. I don’t know Bill Burke personally but the post has a troll-like feel. However, beyond the rhetoric there are concerns that I see [...]
As smart mobile phones such as the iPhone or the Palm Pre offer a better Web-browsing experience, it becomes easier to offer access to enterprise Web applications from these devices. This article includes a few tips for creating mobile-facing content, including dealing with default scaling issues.
Download Episode Batch processing is sometimes viewed as the “old” approach which is no longer relevant. Most new technologies today focus on real-time functionality. But there are many jobs that work well as a batch job. Long running tasks, repetitive tasks, and tasks reliant upon heavily shared resources all benefit from a batch architecture. Given [...]
