Tag Archives: programming

A good Zachman question

Posted on September 13, 2005 by David Megginson

The Zachman Framework (link to a full Wikipedia article) has been around for almost two decades now. It is an approach to enterprise system architecture that involves asking a series of questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how) for … Continue reading →

Tagged programming | 3 Comments

Aspects

Posted on July 29, 2005 by David Megginson

I’ve decided it’s time to figure out if aspect-oriented programming is worth, well, figuring out. So far, nearly everything Google can find for me about AOP is positive — glowing, even — and that makes me nervous. Real change is … Continue reading →

Tagged programming | 7 Comments

Flight Planning with Google Maps

Posted on July 3, 2005 by David Megginson

I threw together a very short demo of a partial flight route — the low-level airway V316 from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie — overlayed on Google Maps using the new Google Maps API (I’ve also mentioned this in a … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, web | 1 Comment

Sean McGrath's obit for SOA

Posted on July 2, 2005 by David Megginson

In his obit for service-oriented architecture (SOA), Sean McGrath draws lessons from the demise of WS-*. Here are what Sean considers the key characteristics of something that might actually work: The noun/verb inversion in REST Temporal decoupling A “lets get … Continue reading →

Tagged programming | 2 Comments

Rails vs. PHP: MVC or view-centric?

Posted on June 11, 2005 by David Megginson

This week, I decided to try PHP and Ruby-on-Rails for prototyping web applications (I’d never used either before). These are both web-application frameworks that serious J2EE-type developers tend to sniff at, claiming that they may be fine for simple toys … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, web | 60 Comments

Burden of Proof

Posted on May 16, 2005 by David Megginson

Bill de hÓra has a thoughtful piece about complexity experts and simplicity mavens. As Bill points out, conventional wisdom provides an easy way to criticize things without really thinking: in the 1990’s, you could diss any project or spec simply … Continue reading →

Tagged programming | 2 Comments

Collateral Damage

Posted on April 14, 2005 by David Megginson

I am a bystander in the war between spammers and virus writers on the one side, and Microsoft and the antivirus companies on the other. I have never in my life read or sent an e-mail message using Microsoft Outlook, … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged programming | 4 Comments

Tech Fashions: What's in a name?

Posted on March 22, 2005 by David Megginson

Dare Obasanjo complains that new names like SOA, AJAX, and REST have more to do with fashion than software. He’s right, but his posting might be missing the point. There are two reasons that a fuzzy, general approach to things … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, web | Comments Off

Open Web, Closed Databases?

Posted on February 14, 2005 by David Megginson

Web site developers seem to be getting open specifications: more and more, I’m seeing sites developed for specifications like (X)HTML, CSS2, DOM, etc., not sites developed for applications like MSIE or Firefox or Opera; I’m seeing Java-based web apps that … Continue reading →

Tagged programming, web | 5 Comments

The complexity of XML parsing APIs

Posted on February 8, 2005 by David Megginson

Dare Obasanjo recently posted a message to the xml-dev mailing list as part of the ancient and venerable binary XML permathread (just a bit down the list from attributes vs. elements, DOM vs. SAX, and why use CDATA?). His message … Continue reading →

Tagged programming | 11 Comments