The operations of many large organizations rest on large applications that
are characterized as "legacy." To increase flexibility or reduce costs
businesses are looking to modernize these applications, for instance, via
renovation, introducing an SOA architecture, or even re-implementing in a new
environment. No matter which approach is taken, it's important to salvage as
much knowledge and logic as possible from the legacy application. Unless the
application's function is obsolete recovering functional knowledge (what does
the application do?) and structural knowledge (how does it do it?) can
accelerate the modernization effort.
A parallel can be drawn with renovating a building, since modernization can
involve gradual changes to the building's internal structure, say, larger
doors, or complete demolition and reconstruction. In both cases blueprints of
the buildin... (more)
One of the most delightful parts of my job is to travel the world, sharing
the Object Management Group's vision of integrated, interoperable systems
with varying sizes of audience from as few as 10 people to as many as
10,000 in every corner of the planet.
While the travel can sometimes be grueling, it's worth it when I get a
question or two after a speech that shows that someone has experienced the
epiphany I myself had in 1989, when I realized that no business can be
automated by software systems until the individual applications that automate
individual processes are inte... (more)
In the swirl of events around the announcement last year of the upcoming
CORBA 3.0, the attention centered on the upcoming CORBA Component Model.
While CORBA has existed in some form or another as an adopted technology of
the OMG's open, neutral, standards-setting process since October 1991, this
year's major revision point for the first time will address a wealth of
issues that point at deployment rather than interface. Let me explain.
A decade ago the Object Management Group started down the road to
infrastructure and end-user standards for interoperability in heterogeneous
ent... (more)
A Capsule History of Active Webs
The runaway success of the Web's HTML display language made everyone in the
software community stop and take note. What was so exciting about this new
technology? Was it the markup language itself? Couldn't be! HTML is just a
stripped down version (DTD) of SGML, which has been around for a while. Was
it the concept of a remote screen interface language? No, X terminals and the
X protocol have been around for years. Could it be the HTTP protocol for
transmitting HTML? Let's hope not. HTTP is basically a broken FTP, and that's
been around for decade... (more)
Even two years after its public debut, the Java juggernaut shows no sign of
slowing. In fact, more than two years after its public debut, its popularity
is still increasing. Businesses are in a headlong rush to move to Java to
take advantage of the cost savings that applications running on the Java
Virtual Machine have to offer. In fact, there are many who believe that soon
not only will everything be programmed in Java but also that all the old
non-Java programs will be scrapped and replaced with Java.
While it would be nice to believe that Java will soon rule the world and that ... (more)