Sharing Session at Office

I'm really happy that after long guerilla warfare, eventually our office officially accepted that we need to develop application based on framework. Judging from experiences in one of our customer, when the sales persons sell 'as a product'.
The customer are expecting much more when they buy application as 'off-the-shelf' product. They handed over a security compliance checklist. What the checklist asks for actually is not a big deal. It should exist on all web application that are exposed to the world.
Just because most of our application were designed to run on a trusted network within telco operator companies, at good ol' times, those people developing the product don't care too much for the security issues. Now come a new generation of customers which expects more from what they think is 'off-the-shelf' product.

This Friday will be a good starting point to change the culture at our company, from spaghetti codes to framework based applications. It's still a long way to go, but I believe it worths the price.

Borland ALM

No, this is not about alm for the needy...

ALM = Application Lifecycle Management

Very interesting, Borland Software Corporation, has shifted from the well-known segmentation as IDE maker into Application Lifecycle Management, and Lifecycle Quality Management. Now it's IDE division will be divested. The Borland Enterprise Server and Visibroker is still held, but not the JBuilder, Delphi, C++ Builder, C# Builder (Borland Studio).

I still remember the time when Borland -- with its TurboPascal, Borland Pascal, Borland C++ -- rules the wave. I also own a licensed copy of Borland C++ 3.0 from Borland, along with its large box, 10 diskettes, set of books, Turbo Profiler, Turbo Assembler which we get from winning the International Computer Programming Computer 1992, Kuala Lumpur. I really love the way Borland as the IDE maker made the Object Windows Library (OWL), which I think is pretty much simpler and easy-to-use. After experiencing MFC in 1995, I still think the OWL is better. But, of course people will be fed up when they have to change the way they use the framework across versions (from 1.0 to 1.1), due to the changes the way operating system handle events.

At JUG-ID they also discussed on the rate of failure of IT projects. I think it is still the common issues in IT development. I believe that that's also an old story for you. People who's been more than 3 years in development should know that the rate of failure of IT projects is high.

Without proper Lifecycle Quality Management, large and long running projects are doomed to failures. Components have to tested thoroughly. Functionality have to be tested over and over again across deployed version. Requirements change. New process breaks down old stable version. etc. etc.
The virtue is that Borland has provided end-to-end tools to do such thing.

I was lucky to be sent (sent by default, coz Mr Pacul was too busy at that time, and some other doesn't have a passport readied) to the Sales Engineer training. It was really a mind changing experience!

For me now, testing is not just to JUnit (regression test). Quality must be embedded into the process of software development, not just test the code after the developers said they have completed the task.

Is it applicable with Java? With JBoss? With JEMS suite? With RedHat stack?
Yes, it is agnostic of the platform. It supports both Java and .NET platform. GUI and Web based. Event telnet session and many others.