Expert Advice

By now, you should at least be passingly familiar with Python. One of the fastest-growing languages, Python has been gaining popularity for years and has reached a level of maturity that makes it a top choice for enterprise development. Companies from Microsoft to Google have embraced Python and are...

Love it or loathe it, there's no arguing that the adult entertainment industry has been at the forefront of technology throughout the growth of the Internet. The adult industry operates on a shoestring and has figured out how to deploy secure and scalable sites on the cheap. We'll take a cue from th...

The question "Why open source?" really encompasses two questions for the enterprise to consider: "Why use open source software?" and "Why should I develop my software in a community-based, open source way?" Who should care about the answers to these questions? Well, virtually everyone. As of 2008,...

Changes impacting storage are taking place at every layer of the network architecture: Disk drives are continuing on a Moore's law-like cost/capacity curve, yet concurrently we are also seeing the growth of solid-state technology to overcome the inherent performance limitations of mechanical disk; v...

Like ERP and CRM before, collaboration is the next big space in software. By the numbers: SharePoint is a billion-dollar business. IBM Lotus is a $700 million business. Forrester Research claims Enterprise 2.0 will grow to a $4.6 billion industry by 2013. Collaboration software is evolving to mean m...

The Linux operating system is highly compatible with two hot computing trends: virtualization and cloud computing. Just as the 2001-2002 recession helped usher in Linux as a mainstream solution, virtualization may accelerate Linux usage during and after the current recession. Linux already has a pow...

Cloud computing describes an Internet-based computing infrastructure that has abstracted users and user applications from the underlying computing resources that support them. In concept, cloud computing is functionally different from previous IT architectures in that users no longer need to own, ha...

It may not seem obvious at first, but the tragic earthquake in Haiti, the historic election that put a Massachusetts Republican in the U.S. Senate and the 2010 Super Bowl all have something in common: the smartphone. During each event, billions of consumers around the globe were glued to their phone...

In 2010, application developers will continue to be asked to do more with less. During the global financial meltdown of the past year, the amount of work didn't change while resources were dramatically pared back. The result was that new projects suffered. Talking with application development lead...

Today's enterprises are clamoring for software applications that run in a wide variety of environments -- everything from physical to virtual to cloud. If you are a software vendor, how do you make it easy to give them what they want? You could hand customers your software on a CD and let them figu...

Linux and open source middleware JBoss has made its mark in the enterprise, and it is just a matter of time before open source becomes mainstream in other functional parts of the IT infrastructure as well. Where exactly that will happen, however, is the interesting question. With most companies spen...

After more than 20 years of evangelization by vendors and consultants, many companies are now fully aware of the benefits of business process management and the value of business process management solutions. These benefits include cost reduction through targeting inefficiencies, improvement of proc...

It has been said that a great user experience in mobile phone offerings is a combination of good engineering, marketing and graphical and user interface design. More importantly, it is about keeping the balance between all these elements. This is why the term "trade-off" is a recurrent one in the mo...

Before we can delve into making a scalable application, it's worth spending some time to define just what scalability is and isn't. Contrary to what many novice developers think, scalability is not primarily about performance. Performance is virtually unrelated to the aggregate scalability of an app...

The traditional process for sourcing creative work contains significant risk for the buyer along with the potential for wonderful reward in the form of great design. The typical risks are threefold: first, finding and working with the right designer for your project; second, the inherent limitations...