Mike Deasy

There is a raging debate in the developer community: Microsoft's new platform .NET versus the Sun standard J2EE. J2EE has been around for a few years, while Microsoft's attempt is decidedly the new kid on the block. While the comparisons may be defined by some as purely technical, some have deemed it a battle of corporate cultures. Sun has certainly chosen to consider that the battle. During a lunch discussion with my fellow officers in the Tulsa Java User Group, we explored the issues. We also decided to see if we could get some vendors to come in and discuss the issues from both perspectives. This expanded into a formal debate, and thus the .NET vs J2EE Smackdown was born. Our group started to plan this event; we contacted Microsoft and Sun and both sides were more th... (more)

CAST Will Map Your Mystery Objects

Consider if you will – a company buys the source code for a large natural gas operations and accounting application and gives a small team of developers the job of supporting it. There are 600-plus PB objects, over 1,700 stored procedures, 604 triggers, 179 views and 400-plus tables in this application. The team has a short time to get up to speed, but the volume and time constraints ma... (more)

What Cost Optimization?

It may not be economically feasible (or necessary) for you to throw money at speeding up applications. Spending a certain amount of money on speed may be expedient and eventually even necessary, but it shouldn't be our first choice as analysts or managers. Too many hours are spent working up cost justification analyses and AFEs (Authority for Expenditures) that could have been spent on a... (more)

Charting The Flight Of The Killer App

Groundbreaking nuclear-geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller said, "Life is a whole ceaseless change. There is no sign of physical limit yet." Bearing that in mind, it occurred to me that I should begin to test the limits of PowerBuilder 8, and see if I could disprove Muller. It seemed to me the easiest way to go about this heady undertaking was to convert our EMS natural gas trading and accou... (more)

Surfing with the Ancient Chinese

Why is it that some Web sites are more appealing and seem to work better than others? It's not always about the speed of the download, although quite often that can be the problem. Sometimes there are broader issues at hand. Even with screens that refresh slowly and try our patience, we can't seem to pull ourselves away as we move from one site to another. There are some Web sites that we... (more)