http://www.summa-tech.com/blog Summa Blog Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:26:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There are many things to consider when integrating with Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, some of which are easily overlooked. In many aspects, integrating with SaaS is similar to integrating with packaged products, but it is often more challenging due to the intricacies of integrating with a system hosted ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/03/04/planning-for-saas-integration/ Many captive software development groups operate at low efficiency.  There are reasons, but do they justify shunning all process improvement? Captive shops produce software with only one customer, the business side of the same company.  From an outside point of view, this should be a great situation for efficient software development, ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/02/26/how%e2%80%99s-your-it-efficiency/ 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. ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/02/05/interface-usability-and-shower-valves/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/01/26/what%e2%80%99s-the-deal-with-java-equals-and-hashcode/ 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 http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/01/20/emerging-opportunities-in-cloud-computing/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/01/18/exploring-the-world-of-online-personal-health-records/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/01/11/developing-iphone-application-memory-management/ 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.  As the application scales, it becomes harder and harder ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2010/01/04/global-error-handling-in-flex/ 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 penny-wise but pound-foolish decisions. Here is my top five list of  enterprise application architecture ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/12/24/five-fallacies-of-application-ruggedization/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/12/09/my-changes-dont-happen-a-java-puzzler/ 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, it's pretty straight-forward what to ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/11/30/using-code-metrics-with-purpose/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/11/18/going-oomph/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/11/07/ten-practical-recommendations-for-designing-and-building-highly-reusable-xml-schemas/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/10/14/does-my-organization-need-an-iphone-application-part-2/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/10/05/handling-jsf-and-facelets-exceptions/ 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 ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/09/30/summa-and-zapthink-soa-events/ 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 Moon landing - this was the introduction of the first generation iPhone. With over 2 billion application downloads later, ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/09/28/does-my-organization-need-an-iphone-application-part-1/ So you think you want to develop software applications for the iPhone. Sure, this is no big deal, you've been writing Java or C# for years now. You transitioned to those languages from Visual Basic 6. Heck, you even took C++ in school. You're certainly not the type intimidated by ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/09/15/developing-iphone-applications-5-things-you-should-know/ My  background is with Java and Flex development, so there was a lot to get used to with Xcode. One of the steepest learning curves came with Interface Builder.  I've used technologies like JSP, Facelets for JSF, and Flex MXML to develop user interfaces.  In all of these technologies, you ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/09/10/developing-iphone-applications-interface-builder/ Your team has designed the perfect architecture for an SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) project. You are all excited and ready to get rolling. A few weeks later you find out that you will need to make several compromises in your design because of other teams' skills and constraints. Your end ... http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2009/09/01/soa-integration-project-challenges/