Summa

As Javascript has become more powerful over the years, user input fields have evolved to be more innovative and intuitive. One particular example is a time-picker, which has been around in JQuery for a while now. Imagine you are working in a room reservation system and you want your user to pick hours and minutes to reserve a room. JQuery has jQuery.timepickr.js.

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We have all been in projects where we use a combination of open source libraries, for different components of our architecture. We know theoretically that it should work, but alas, something blows up at runtime. If we’re lucky, we experience this on a weekly basis, but we don’t get lucky that often. The “Conundrum Solved” series will tackle some of these hair-pulling, sleep-depriving, grouch-inducing problems some of us at Summa have encountered in our projects. We hope that by sharing them with you, you’ll keep your hair, get enough sleep, and maintain a smile on your face!

Problem: Invalidly getting an InvalidStateObjectStateException thrown upon calling  merge(), even if there were no updates to the entity.

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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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So how do we manage this communication chasm? We all agree that having some software tools is good for the business. We all agree that there is a cost to develop custom software. But as we go deeper, we don’t understand much. The developers don’t understand the business domain and the business folks don’t understand the software domain. One way to look at this is by observing the growth in the number of details over the course of development.

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In the early days of SOA many new products arrived on the scene that seemed to be solutions looking for a problem. As the SOA space matures (or maybe matured, since some have claimed it is dead*), so do the products and the relevant architectural patterns that use those products. However, there are other areas of SOA where you find solutions looking for a problem - the services themselves.

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During the course of a corporate portal upgrade project, we were able to reduce the new hardware budget by 50% of the original estimate. We were also able to reduce the customer’s original software licensing and support costs by 50% of their previous operating environment while creating four new additional operating environments — three of which were clustered. This was done by leveraging Solaris 10 zones and sub-capacity licensing.

This project was proof that virtualization is becoming more important, especially in tough economic times. People are being asked to do more with less, IT managers are being asked to cut budgets while at the same time delivering value to the organization. When people talk about virtualization these days, VMWare is what typically comes to mind first. Although, there are several other virtualization options available. Here’s a story about how we were able to achieve significant cost savings for one of our customers in 2008.

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I would just like to take a second to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Stonebrook and I am a Senior Software Consultant with Summa. I just recently led a successful project that implemented an advanced web user interface in Flex and boy - it changed my perspective of what a web application has to be forever more.

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A developer asked “How to convince someone [an IT manager] of the value proposition of great/beautiful code? (Or at least the value of code smell eradication.)”

This is a very real problem and is especially prevalent (in my experience) in larger, older programs that have met with some success, especially when the management are non-coder folk.

Beautiful Code is not an aesthetic pursuit; the Beauty lies in the fact that the code is well structured, concise, and obvious. This kind of beauty has high business value because it requires less effort and cost to extend with new features and to track down bugs.

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