Application Development

Moving to Eclipse 3 – I Wanna be a DB Architect

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 19, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

(A preview of the End of the Entry: I was going to write about Eclipse as DB Tool, met with more barriers, but I’m finding success in flexing my Eclipse muscles re: extensibility). Fine, I’ll push off my XML project(s) even more, let’s tackle something that has been nagging me at work and I need [...]

Moving to Eclipse 2 – Working out the basic process

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 5, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Installation was all well and good, but now I need to make a few minor changes to the site, so let’s go through the process. I get the weirdest, boringest links in my Adsense area lately, so I’m going to experiment with positioning by include script. Nothing too stunning technically, but since I use Blogger [...]

Moving to Eclipse Ia – Relevance

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 1, 2005 ⋅ One comment

Last post, I just focused on the tech play-by-play. More steps to follow, but let’s think about why the business-focused areas of the company might be interested in the effort: Cost-effectiveness: The obvious play is the cost angle – the budget-focused can be happy that Eclipse and a rack of free plugins might replace user [...]

Moving to Eclipse I – Magic Bullet?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 30, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Seeking Development Convergence … Over the past few weeks, I’ve almost written an entry about juggling multiple development tools for work and home projects – CSS editor, HTML editor, web site code generation tool, remote terminal sessions to web server, and two or three browser windows, wildly flipping between them all to get even the [...]

Pendulum swings – Santayana says …

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 12, 2005 ⋅ One comment

I saw Stewart’s article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts … A classic blunder made by many corporate IT [...]

Going all the way – central reporting database

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ May 9, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

When implementing centralized reporting systems, you need to make sure you are prepared to go “all the way” – after the implementation is done. We’ve recently finished the first phase of a project to centralize and consolidate financial reporting in a single tool / platform; pretty common stuff, and this story is relevant to any [...]

Things for the DIY programmer to consider

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 14, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Things for the DIY programmer to consider Another thought-provoking post on Thinking Faster – he sounds like my business doppelganger … When considering the option to build vs. buy, or at least involve corporate IT and/or experienced developers, most folks with a business background miss some key considerations about their approach: Is robust multi-user required? [...]

Motivating Maintenance Programmers

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ January 7, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

Interesting conversation today with one of my application managers. As we move into the new year, we’re doing some “spring cleaning” of the older projects in our PMO. Two from last summer had languished – efforts to develop simple web front ends for order inquiry and dealer information – and I asked my lead web [...]

Interesting Design Sessions

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 21, 2004 ⋅ Post a comment

Had two interesting design sessions yesterday, both of which got me thinking / observing … Push to Prod A team of techs, working in a Unix / Progress environment (QAD MFG/PRO eB2), reviewing our plans for improving our Dev/Test/Prod cycle for controlling / auditing the movement of source between environments. A little history – we [...]

Beermat App Development

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 18, 2004 ⋅ Post a comment

Nice article on gapingvoid – you could replace all the marketing concepts in the punchline paragraph and replace with systems development ideas. Although it’s not often any more that folks suggest major software deployments or custom development projects just to make themselves look good, it was defnitiely prevalent in the 90′s. Of course, don’t get [...]

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