Shahid’s Perspectives

For those of us that are tired of spam in our snail mail and haven’t quite found the equivalent of a physical bayesian filter for their real postal mail, take a look at Remote Control Mail. I found their idea of a permanent (snail) mail address where they gather all of your incoming mail, scan (the outside), notify you of its existence (with the outside scan), scan the inside if you like (for a fee), and then either forward it to you or shred it, truly astounding. This is one of those services you didn’t really know you need until someone comes up with it and then you say “hey, I could use that!” Worth checking out, especially for those on the move or own their own small businesses.

Most small companies don’t think they can afford a PR firm but Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace is looking to change all that by giving top-notch PR advice to small and medium sized businesses. She recently interviewed me for her new article about how blogging is shaping the tech debate and I’m quoted in her analysis. The article is quite insightful and you should check it out.

This week I was in San Diego attending JavaPro Live! 2005. I found the conference cozy (small :-)), informative, and for the most part useful. One of the highlights of my trip (aside from attending with a client of mine, Mr. John Dougherty, another very bright Architect) was being able to spend a few “off” hours with Michael Keith, the co-specification lead for the EJB 3.0 JSR (220). I found Mike to be thoughtful, articulate, and quite knowledgable of the persistence space. His background was with TopLink and JDO and he brings a lot of credibility to the JSR 220 working group. Unlike some members of other JSRs I’ve talke with in the past, he was not arrogant and didn’t believe that his little corner of the universe knew everything there was to know. I’ve not been a big fan of EJB 1.x through 2.x for many technical reasons and its lack of simplicity but now that I’ve worked with the EJB 3.0 draft (writing real code) for almost 6 months I find it quite usable and a great alternative to other distributed object programming models. And, after meeting Mike Keith, I think the spec is in very good hands and I have very hopes for EJB 3.0 when it hits the streets.

As we all know, one of the most important aspects of our complex systems architecting and design phases is documentation. But, given the challenges created by high-speed development where code (both application and database side) are constructed so quickly it’s hard to keep up. There are many tools for better comprehension of Java code (like superb IDEs) but the database comprehension tools are still fairly weak. In my own projects I almost always create automated DBDD (database design documentation) tools to make sure that as my databases grow in complexity their designs are still comprehensible without requiring manual steps to keep them up to date. My DBDD tools are integrated with my CI (continuous integration) tools so database documents are built quite regularly. They’re far from perfect but they’re certainly useful. An open source tool that I have been tracking for a little while, called SchemaSpy, is not quite up to the standards of my own tools but if you don’t have a database documentation tool as part of your CI builds, definitely give SchemaSpy a shot. SchemaSpy doesn’t replace things like Embarcadero or ERwin or DB Visualizer but for pure comprehension and documentation it’s very nice.