Steve Benfield

Read JDJ's 2004 Predictions by i-Technology Leaders Feature Story Read The End of Middleware by Jonathan Schwartz Read Offshore Outsourcing by Jack Martin My dad is a DBA. However, he doesn't design large databases, he doesn't write extremely elaborate multiselect SQLs (I don't think he's ever read a Joe Celko book), and he certainly doesn't care about the latest, greatest news in the world of technology. He's been at the same place for about 15 years , is respected by his co-workers, and makes sure that the rest of his organization gets the information necessary to get their jobs done. I have another friend who is a programmer. She works with Visual Studio, cranks out form-based apps that attach to data, and basically helps build client/server apps for her organization.... (more)

Beyond BPM: Using Goal-Seeking Agents to Tackle Highly-Complex SOA Applications

Solving complexity has been a continuing goal of application architects & developers since we started writing programs. While SOA techniques do a great job at standardizing the interface between systems and BPEL attempts to standardize the logic flow between services, they tend to break down when systems become overly complex and uncertainty is introduced into the system. An Agent-Orient... (more)

Silverstream

As the push to Web-based computing gains momentum, the variety of available tools, standards, techniques and languages gets increasingly complex. In implementing a Web strategy, IS managers must make some hard decisions on issues that include: supported browsers, ISP selection, Web server platform and OS, application server platform and OS, object architecture standards, client-side comp... (more)

Product Review: SilverStream 2.0

To put it bluntly, SilverStream 2.0 sets a new standard for large-scale Web development and deployment. We first looked at the product in June 1997 when they were the newest entrant in the application server market. It lacked many enterprise features such as scalability, fault tolerance and CORBA support. In addition, it only offered advantages in the area of Java client development and ... (more)

Real World WSFL

Web services has promised many things. One primary promise has been the ability to piece applications together by snapping Web services together like so many Lego blocks. The output of one service becomes the input to the next and so on. In 2001, IBM published a specification called WSFL 1.0: Web Services Flow Language. WSFL is a language used to define business processes using Web serv... (more)