What's new in week 37, 2008

Wednesday, 2008-09-10, Copenhagen

HP is quite serious about its competition with IBM and MS on all types of software and hardware systems. It has recently launched project and portfolio management tools into its business product suite. Seems that enterprises now have quite a few (more than 3) choices to go when only giant vendors are considered.

Seems that Google is becoming a place where people meet and discuss their ambitions and leave and create their own company and sell their company with a big number. One example is the new engine called Cuil ("cool" as it is pronounced) which is designed by former Google members. This new search engine is claimed to provide even more information with less hardware spending. Let's see how this start-up goes and when Google will acquire it.

Friday, 2008-09-12, Copenhagen

Sun is definitely joining the cloud computing team. It recently annouced the preview release of JavaFX, which is its rich client platform for building rich internet applications (RIAs). After Microsoft and Adobe, Sun is becoming another vendor that provides the basic programming facilities for building cloud computing applications.

Look out! Amazon is crazy about getting people to use its cloud computing web services. Long after its Elastic Cloud and Simple Storage Service offers, it launches the Mechanical Turk, which is a website that let non-programmers to create basic tasks of certain web services with requirements and let other people (such as a part-time programmer) to finish the rest of the work.

Sunday, 2008-09-14, Copenhagen

When enterprises grow bigger, it become more and more important to have better understanding of its IT architecture and assets. Meta recently annouced a road-mapping tool, called "Mega IT Planning," to help enterprises to manage IT architecture. Looks like that many architects will be interested in the tool.

The Web-collaboration-tool market is far away from being mature. Google and Microsoft SharePoint are among the leading ones. Central Desktop is another software provider who tries to compete with the giants in this market. As claimed by its CEO, Central Desktop provides more collaboration functionalities than Google Apps while requires less resource than SharePoint. It seems that Central Desktop is trying to find a balance between the "thin" functionalities of Google App and the "fat" requirements of SharePoint.

Notes for Chapter 5 of "Beyond Software Architecture"

Chapter 5 "Technology in-licensing"

This chapter talks about how different technologies can be integrated into a software architecture by licensing. A general point is that using code or components by licensing can save the energy and time of the key technical employees. On the other hand, it is important to have lawyers to clarify the relevant issues when licenses are involved.

There are many risks/rewards for using licensed technologies. One should keep all these in mind when being at the front of such decisions. Actually this is not only about component-based software. An OS can be a licensed technology to an enterprise. Such considerations of risks/rewards still apply here.

Another thing to be careful with is the software itself may have a different pricing model that conflicts with the licensed technologies. Here the software architecture matters. It should be designed to solve the conflict.

Open source technology is always a good consideration, but one has to bear in mind the pros and cons behind it. Every open source software license is different.