There is this conferenceWaterfall 2006 happening on how Waterfall models is coming back. I believe it is a spoof - more like Fools Day celebration, since the date is 1st April.

Anyway, one of the presentations by Robert C Martin talks about - how designs are ruined by execution. I really liked this part

Implementation is harmful to designs! Implementation ruins the elegance, beauty, and symmetry of designs. The problem is execution; and so it is execution that must be eliminated. As a community of designers we need to insist that our designs remain unexecutable!

All we are saying, is give design a chance. The code lies and designs die. The only good design is an unexecutable design. Stop all code. Pay for design, not for code! Code is not the answer!

Check out the article here.

As enterprises start building there Enterprise Portals, one of the common use complaints is portals are too slow. The dashboards in the portal are pulling data from multiple systems and repositories. Further, the data might be structured or unstructured based on the source. Pulling all this data, cleansing this data is consuming considerable CPU cycles. All this is leading to a very bad user experience.

What’s the way out?

• One way to migrate all the data onto a common structure and repository. This will be a considerable effort. Many organizations may not want to go this way.

• Another is create some kind of common data access layer where we can pull data across disparage systems. Products like WebSphere Information Integrator - Content Ed, fit this very much. We can add also add a caching solution using something like IBM Edge Servers to cache the data.

All this allows to provide data to the Portal with out modifying existing systems and still achieve a better user experience.

Some of the other similar products in the Information Integration space are
o Business Objects Data Federator
o BEA AquaLogic Data Services
o Composite Software Information Server
o WebSphere Information Integrator
o Metamatrix
o Avaki
o XAware

Filed in: Portals

Time and again, best practices have been published. It has been more of taking some of the earlier ones and adding some new info to the same. IBM has published some of the best practices when developed using WebSphere Portal. Check these out.

Java EE Best Practices
IBM API Best Practices
IBM JSR 168 API Best Practices

Happy Coding !

Filed in: WPS