VisualAge Executive Summary
The following are current OO industry topics of interest to VisualAge
development:
The swing back toward thin clients
The move
to eCommerce
It's the monopoly, stupid
|
The swing back toward thin clients |
| There are different technologies to pick from, including RMI, DCOM, IIOP,
and CORBA. But how are people using these technologies. The tendency is
toward a new slant on the old "dumb terminal" and server. We see
indicators of these trends in the advent of the Network Computer (NC), which is
the ultimate centralization of computing control - NCs usually don't have disk
or diskette drives, e.g.
So what does all this mean? It means that we've discovered that it's easier
to build distributed systems that are mostly centralized. So, most topologies
include multiple client systems and one or more servers, but with very distinct
roles, such as a "system" server and a "database" server.
These examples fill out the (in)famous "three-tier" architecture that
people talk about so much.
Thin clients certainly make software upgrades easy, reduces equipment costs,
and helps ensure data security. All this comes at a cost of increased risk from
a single point of failure and bottleneck of processing. I guess as long as we
can keep pushing off the tough problems onto hardware that keeps getting orders
of magnitude faster, this will work. |
|
The move to eCommerce |
| There are many predictions about the amount of money that will be spent in
the next two years on eCommerce. The good news is that these efforts, while
important and non-trivial, are not significant from your application's
standpoint.
I just came from a customer site where a new requirement for the system was
that the software be purchasable over the Internet. This requirement was written
up as a use case, just like all other requirements. The difference comes when
we look at the business' object model and see that it is not affected. The
effort is totally orthogonal to the product - it's just a marketing channel to
the end user. So, a separate group can work on eCommerce and web site issues
before, during, and/or after the product development effort. |
|
It's the monopoly, stupid |
| There are a lot of people who seem to be viewing the Microsoft legal
situation as a religious war - those who are jealous vs those who are zealots.
That's not the issue. It all comes down to control. You either believe in a
capitalistic system or you don't. To paraphrase: power corrupts, monopolistic
power corrupts absolutely.
One of my customers recently asked me why I cared about Netscape, since IE
is a good browser and it's free. He said "I'll worry about it if that
changes." The problem is, that will be too little, too late - no
alternatives will exist anymore and it will take time and agony to resolve. | |
