Given that all the major players like IBM and BEA are looking to make ESB announcement these days, it’s good to remember that you can’t just take an older product and just throw in a few bells and whistles and then relabel it as an ESB. If you’re interested in the “pure play” ESBs take a look at this article at Infoworld.com describing the ESB playing field.
I’m not sure i completely concur with Tim’s post on the basic difference between IDEA and Eclipse but as a huge fan of IntelliJ’s IDE I found that it did have some truth to it. Tim says:
Since Eclipse is a free, open source application/platform, the revenue model is based on providing extensions, support, and training. If it was intuitive, easy to use, easy to extend, or a complete solution, there would be no incentive for people to pay for the services that make money.
Since IntelliJ IDEA is not free or open source, the revenue model is based on sales. Sales are driven by the quality, ease of use, and completeness of the product. If it fails in these areas, it doesn’t sell.
I loved the list of top 10 developer excuses that Enrique posted on his blog.
10. ‘That’s weird…’
9. ‘It’s never done that before.’
8. ‘It worked yesterday.’
7. ‘You must have the wrong version.’
6. ‘It works, but it hasn’t been tested.’
5. ‘Somebody must have changed my code.’
4. ‘Did you check for a virus?’
3. ‘Where were you when the program blew up?’
2. ‘Why do you want to do it that way?’
1. ‘I thought I fixed that.’
I haven’t worked on C code for a few months now but I thought this technology was pretty nifty. They provide an IDE that can take C code and compile it to Java bytecodes to run on any VM. From their description:
Axiomatic Multi-Platform C (AMPC) is a C compiler suite with an IDE that generates Java bytecode to produce platform independent applicatons. It supports a very large subset of ANSI C (1989). It can be used to develop new applications using C as well as port existing applications written in C to run on JVM enabled devices. A JNI (JVM Native Interface) feature is available for calling native C or C++ functions. Also, many Java methods can be called from AMPC. The asm() directive can be used to embed Jasmin assembly code within C source code. It is useful for writing new applications using existing C skill-sets and porting C programs.
I found a nice survey of AJAX libraries and another site with a great overview of AJAX frameworks.
A few important early contracts have been awarded by HHS to learn more about the EMR, EHR, and Healthcare IT market. If you’re in the healthcare world, take a look at this report and this one.
The Markle Foundation has released the Attitudes of Americans Regarding Personal Health Records and Nationwide Electronic Health Information Exchange research report. It’s numbers are bit lower than the numbers from the 2004 Harris survey regarding interest in personal health records.
I didn’t find the new Markle report terribly revealing nor actionable but I am glad to see that Americans would start to use personal health records if all the stars were aligned properly. More than these reports, I find survey data about online banking a more useful barometer.
I think that because the financial and banking industry has demonstrated that we as Americans will use the Internet to help protect and provide online usuage of one our most important assets (our wealth) we would be more than willing to do it for an even more important asset (our health). However, unlike banks which were already computerized generally and are using the web to provide access to those computer records most of our physicians and hospitals do not have that capability. And, online banking and managing online financial records actually improves profit margins and increases revenues for banks; this is something that can not be said for medical records access yet because medical records are still paper based in healthcare institutions.
The fluffy Markle survey implies:
More than seven out of 10 Americans support the creation of a nationwide health information exchange or network for doctors and patients.
Americans believe an electronic exchange of health information would enhance quality and increase efficiency of the health care system.
The majority of Americans saying they would support the creation of a secure online personal health record service, there is strong evidence that Americans would actually use this type of service.
A couple of interesting tidbits from the Sep 19, 2005 New York Times article “Doctors Join to Promote Electronic Record Keeping”:
…last week, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, government and private health care officials were rushing to build an electronic database of prescription drug records for hundreds of thousands of people who lost their records in the storm. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the chaos wreaked by Katrina “powerfully demonstrated the need for electronic health records.
…fewer than 5 percent of physicians nationally are using a computerized system as part of patient care, said Dr. Thomas J. Handler, a research director at the Gartner market research group. For most doctors who work in groups of five or fewer, the portion is probably 3 percent or less, he said.
Here’s what Dr. Charles Safran, Chairman of the American Medical Informatics Association, says about personal health records:
In our country, patients are the most under-utilized resource, and they have the most at stake. They want to be involved and they can be involved. Their participation will lead to better medical outcomes at lower costs with dramatically higher patient /customer satisfaction. We should remember that the real goal of improved health information systems is not better hospitals or better physician practices, but better quality of health care and healthier consumers.
Those of us involved in the healthcare IT (HIT) market may want to keep an eye on these new awards and other RFIs related to it. According to Government Computer News (GCN):
The Health and Human Services Department will award contracts next week in the next step in its efforts to pave the way for adoption of health IT. The contracts are intended to develop standards harmonization, standards compliance certification and assessments of the variations in state privacy laws.
We’ve all heard how a substantial number of software projects fail or are cancelled routinely. For years developers have said “if only the requirements were right, the software would have worked right.” Intuitively we all understand that the better the user community (business users in many cases) can get the product defined the more likely the software will work. Agile processes and methodologies insist that the best way to do this is to show early and show often the fruits of the development labor but hold back on writing pages and pages of specifications. A new category of software, known as prototyping, application simulation, or application modeling tools, allow end users to create quick prototypes and workflows that can be handed to developers to do the actual coding. If you’re in the market for these types of tools, which can end up saving a great deal of time and effort, take a look at the following short list (many more are on the way, though).
Of all the tools, the cheapest is Axure and at almost a quarter of a million dollars the most expensive is iRise. Each tool specializes in specific areas but start with something simple like Axure and move up as you need more functionality from the more expensive tools. In any case, if you can actually get your end users or business customer helping define your custom projects using a prototyping or simulation tool almost any amount of money is worth the investment if your projects are important.
As a consultant with clients that are on both the .NET and Java platforms (and many other legacy ones, too) I follow Microsoft’s progress closely. Over the past few years the test automation and test early (unit testing, JUnit, etc) thought leaders have made significant progress on the Java platform. The tools are solid, IDE support is deep, and it’s almost taken for granted. Although open source tools like NUnit have been available for the Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft itself was a little slow to support integrated and automated unit testing. Now, however, in Visual Studio 2005 they have learned from everyone else and have done a great job of integrating code quality via test automation directly into the IDE. Check out the following articles to see how far they’ve come and for a peek at where other IDE vendors will need to go to keep up:
