Summa

A few weekends ago my father and I were installing a shower valve in my soon-to-be new bathroom in my soon-to-be remodeled basement. This isn’t your father’s shower valve though; no, this is a new-fangled shower valve. You are all familiar with shower valves (I hope), they come in two varieties mostly: 1. two knobs…one hot, one cold. 2. One lever/knob that gradually goes from cold to hot. I could go into much more detail on how this works now that I am a plumbing master, but that’s for another blog and another time.

So on with the story. We are installing this valve I bought without really inspecting at the store (I figured a shower valve is a shower valve right? The most important thing is that my wife likes the color), and it is the lever type that mixes hot and cold as you move it left to right. However, we notice that while this controls the temperature mix of the water it does not actually allow water to flow through the valve. That is controlled by another lever attached to the valve.

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I came across this issue a couple years ago. It was surprisingly not-so-obvious to the developer, a good developer, who was sorting out a very elusive bug in a large Java application.

The symptom was that a Map of objects sometimes returned null when queried. The developer ran the code in a debugger and could see that the object was put into the Map. Yet, when the map was asked to retrieve the object, it was not found (even though it could be seen by inspection in the debugger).

Other objects were successfully stored and retrieved from the same Map.

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Summa CEO Audrey Dunning will share insight to the future of Cloud Computing as a panelist along with representatives from Amazon, Salesforce.com and IBM at a TiE Pittsburgh event to be held at CMU on Wednesday, Jan 27. More information here: here and registration with TiE Pittsburgh here

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You might have noticed how hard it is to obtain your own health care history. Most medical records are written on paper. This is changing, but slowly. Even forward-looking doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies who are converting to electronic records have a hard time integrating with each other, since each IT system is largely independent of other systems. What you, the patient, would like to see is all of your history together in one place, regardless of who the provider was or where the care was given.

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Applications for mobile platform are increasingly becoming an important market sector for all kinds of service providers. With the growing popularity of the iPhone and Apple’s well designed SDK, there are plenty of iPhone development project offerings even in this slow economic scenario. At Summa, we recently had a great experience developing a sleek iPhone application with a large user base. The purpose of this blog is to put together conceptual information along with project experiences around the important aspects of Objective-C’s memory management that would be helpful as one begins to delve deep into iPhone development.

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I have worked on a few large Flex applications, and almost everything about the platform delights me — it is quick to prototype, powerful in creating rich UIs. But it often frustrates me how difficult it is to handle run-time errors. There are posts, discussions and threads around tackling this issue. I have put together some of those ideas into a solution that I like, and wanted to share it.

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Summa architects often find that we are smoke-jumping late into failing projects to fire-fight failing business critical web and enterprise applications. Often the failures are a direct result of a road laid by best intentions (and limited budgets). Here is my top five list of enterprise application architecture fallacies that result in significant failures. Each fallacy could stand a lot more discussion - but let’s start with some thought-provoking ideas:

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A few weeks ago I ran into a Java problem that took me an embarrassingly long time to solve — I won’t even tell you how long it took me to notice the source of the bug. It’s a relatively common mistake for starting developers — and clearly it even happens once in a while to experienced guys who aren’t paying attention. I figured I would detail my problem in the hopes that someone else out there might run across this post and save themselves half an hour or more of combing through their code.

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I know plenty of developers who, at a tactical level, have had success with static source code analysis tools, using them to help find and root out bad code smells. When PMD tells us there’s an empty catch block at line 207, for instance, we know exactly what to do.

At an aggregate level, however, code metrics are seldom so helpful or straight-forward. When seeing that a source tree has 160,000 lines of code or an average cyclomatic complexity of 4.12, our first thought is usually “interesting!”…followed shortly by “well, now what?”.

The problem is, in my experience, we often look at our code metrics in isolation, without good comparison points, leaving us to wonder whether the numbers we see are big or small, typical or abnormal, good or bad. In the end, it’s not clear what to do, if anything.

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As a newbie to the field of IT consulting, I am constantly observing my more seasoned colleagues. In my observation, a characteristic common among “good IT consultants” is that they are technology savvy. They are IT geeks and have a thirst to learn new technologies. They desire to be a part of the next big IT movement and spend their spare time - evenings, weekends, holidays acquainting themselves with new technologies, and creating mini projects to work on and learn.

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XML Schema Definition (XSD) files define the structure and data types used in XML messages. XML schemas are a must-have in any application that relies on the use of XML. XML Schemas have become the universal definition language for integrating systems, as well as for defining common formats used for data interchange. Although there is not a “one size fits all” standard for creating schemas, it is essential to define XML Schema standards within IT organizations in order to ensure XML schemas can be easily reused, maintained and extended while minimizing impact on existing integrations. Without best practices and naming conventions, a project can end up with inconsistent schemas that may be too rigid or too relaxed to meet project requirements. On this blog post, I will go over ten practical tips for designing and building reusable XML Schemas. These recommendations can be used as a starting point for defining XML Schema standards within your organization.

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In our first post about whether or not an organization should consider building an iPhone application, we were walking through a series of questions:

• Why is my application a fit?
• Why now?
• How hard is it?
• What should I worry about?
• How do I get started?

Let’s pick up with “How hard is it”? If you want to reread about the first 2 questions - just jump back to the first part in the series.

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Say you need to hide internal application errors to your users in a friendly way and also notify the support staff of this exceptional condition. In this post you’ll find a way to do that in a JSF web app. The JSF flavor I’m using is Apache MyFaces 1.1 JSF implementation with the Tomahawk component which provides some extra functionality on top of JSF.

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Summa is sponsoring two upcoming  ZapThink SOA events.

The first event is a networking and panel discussion of SOA Experts (including Jason Bloomberg, David Linthicum, Summa’s own Jason Armstrong and others.) It is October 1 in Washington DC (Tyson’s Corner).  More details are here:

The second event is in Pittsburgh on October 22nd - focused on SOA and modernization featuring project case studies from CMU ahd Highmark. More detail and registration information are here.

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So - do you remember where you were on June 29, 2007? You probably didn’t realize it - but the world changed that day. No - this was no 9/11 type incident or Moon landing, this was the introduction of the first generation iPhone. With over 2 billion application downloads later, the iPhone has changed the way mobile computing is perceived and has forced its competitors to dramatically upgrade their product offerings to compete. There is so much momentum in mobile computing now, things will never be the same. But - that’s a good thing!

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