This is about Ruby on Rails. Not meant to start a flamewar, and not written to bash it. It is just that some of my concerns are not only mine apparently. When I wrote about Rails framework before, I was fond of the productivity it brought. Especially with the support for Ruby in Netbeans, ROR becomes a nice framework. However, scalability and other stability, enterprise features in general are required in our age. You can go ahead and read about the scalibility features of ROR all around the web, I did so. ...

This is about Ruby on Rails. Not meant to start a flamewar, and not written to bash it. It is just that some of my concerns are not only mine apparently. When I wrote about Rails framework before, I was fond of the productivity it brought. Especially with the support for Ruby in Netbeans, ROR becomes a nice framework. However, scalability and other stability, enterprise features in general are required in our age. You can go ahead and read about the scalibility features of ROR all around the web, I did so. ...

I was thinking that Microsoft was going to follow a more infrastructure oriented approach like other vendors. Even when I read that they have acquired a healthcare informatics company that has its own hospital information system, I was expecting that system to be transformed into some form of Microsoft Healthcare Framework, but it appears MS is taking a bold step, and entering the hospital information system market directly. People, this is big news! It is quite interesting that I do not see many news about this, but Microsoft is the only large vendor that I know of, who is providing a HIS directly to the market. So far, MS has been a technology supplier for many healthcare solutions, and they have invested heavily in healthcare. It appears they are using a different strategy here; instead of waiting for the ISVs to build a solution based on their tech, just give them a head start by giving a complete product, and let them work on it. Not that the ISVs have not been able to do it, but appearantly they have decided to take things under control, and maybe increase the pace adoption of MS technologies in healthcare. ...

For the last 10 years or so, I’ve been working in the software business. I’ve worked in almost every way from freelancer to R&D Director, and in the process I’ve had the opportunity to work at some quite good companies. Some of these companies did exceptionally well during the time I worked for them, and some had real problems. Profitability was an issue almost always. In a competitive environment, the pressure comes from both directions; competitor companies bidding for lower prices, and talented developers rising costs, or worse, incapable developers rising costs. ...

I’ve been interested in implementations of dynamic languages in mainstream languages for a while. IronPython and Jruby have been showing great progress, and especially jruby has achieved a status where it can run rails apps in a java app server. Dynamic languages has their own set of advantages, and sometimes I really miss their features. However, there is a problem, there is almost always a catch with re-implementations, and they are not always minor differences. There is a nice library that you might consider implementing one day, and you can not be sure that IronPython or Jruby will allow you to do so. ...

Microsoft has just offered Yahoo over 44 billion dollars to buy them. This is a very serious amount, and everyone seems to agree that there is one other actor that forced Microsoft into this move: Google. I’ve been having a discussion with many of my colleagues, and friends about why Google is considered as a source of value at all. I hear the argument a lot: tell me what Google produces please? Well, it is simple Google produces information, and meta information. I see the whole IT industry as a set of layers, each one building on top of them. At every point in time, there is a layer that generates value added more than others, and it does this by building its products or services on top of others. ...

Eclipse supports more than one way of referencing libraries, for example MyEclipse hibernate support adds related jars in a separate item which is not in referenced libraries. You see another item in the package explorer under your project. The result? Almost always, Google Web Toolkit refuses to load these libraries. Apparently the best thing to do is to create a local folder like libs or something, copy the jars into it, and add them from the build path configuration. Otherwise, running the deployed code becomes a nightmare. ...

Eclipse supports more than one way of referencing libraries, for example MyEclipse hibernate support adds related jars in a separate item which is not in referenced libraries. You see another item in the package explorer under your project. The result? Almost always, Google Web Toolkit refuses to load these libraries. Apparently the best thing to do is to create a local folder like libs or something, copy the jars into it, and add them from the build path configuration. Otherwise, running the deployed code becomes a nightmare. ...

No matter how many years you spend on software development, this particular situation always seems to emerge. I have spent the last 3 hours trying to figure out why my code is not working. I am writing an Eclipse plugin (actually an Eclipse RCP application) for Bayesian inference, and I need to use a native dll that belong to the inference library I am using. How hard can it be? Well either I am not at my brightest day today, or configuring a reference to a native dll is rediciolusly hard. There are about a zillion parameters you can set, and after working on zillion of them, what seems to be working is to follow the steps below ...

Ok, this is all over the web now and a huge amount of discussions have began. These two important purchases mean different things for me. First of all; IF Oracle can manage to not to screw up assets of BEA, and keep it as a complementary line of products on top of its existing solutions, that’d be a good move. I have to say that I have never even been satisfied with any product of Oracle other than their databases. Their DB rocks and we all know it. It is “the” database that I’d be setting up if someone told me that they wanted the highest possible reliability and security. Their solutions for upper layers however are plain unusable. This might sound harsh, but from the development environment to their middleware, Oracle has not done a good job for the last 4 or 5 years. Maybe it was because they bought second class solutions in the first place, or they were not successful in enhancing the solutions they’ve purchased, but looking at what Microsoft has done with MS Sql Server (which was originally a Sybase product) I can say that I’d prefer Oracle not to try to change anything they buy. BEA has a good set of products, their application server and development environments have been among the top rated solutions for the last few years in Java domain. So if Oracle leaves them alone, we might get some very attractive bundles with Oracle DBs ...