In its attempts to modernize retirement claims processing the Office of Personnel Management had several versions of this project cancelled. The most recent of which used "requirements, design, implement, and test cycles to develop the system. During the testing phases, serious issues became evident". In trying again the director said that they weren't going to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Most of the discussion about cloud computing has focused on tools, providers, and security. While this focus is appropriate for an emerging technology, it becomes easier to recognize the value of cloud computing when you have actual application examples, or case studies. This month IBM announced two such applications: a development-and-test cloud, and an animation rendering cloud.
Brett Taylor, founder of FriendFeed, describes how they overcame some limitations of MySQL to handle problems of scaling and database evolution by implementing a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL.
A recent article makes a case for the REST architectural style using a Department of Defense’s project, called Net-Centric Data Strategy (NCDS), as an example. The authors argue that some of the core objectives of NCDS can be more naturally supported by the four basic principles of REST.
This article combines the case-study experience of the author and a general decision-making framework for agile teams facing the challenge of introducing a new technology, mid-stream in a project.
This short article is a first-person case history of someone taking up Agility for the first time. It covers the problems and reactions that are common to most teams and most developers.
Stefan Norberg presents Unibet.com’s architecture, the challenges faced and the solutions adopted in order to sustain live and offline betting over an entire continent. They started with a monolithic database and moved towards a finely tuned front-end architecture - XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1, YUI, caching, compression, image spriting, CDN striping – plus using multiple replicas for scaling out.
This session takes an inside look at successfully delivering from concept to cash, showing the technical aspects of what's required to iteratively build a robust product that always performs, and the skill and discipline needed to deliver high-quality software to production every week. We know this because we wrote one of the busiest entertainment Web sites in the UK from scratch.
Learn about the re-launch of Major League Baseball’s website on Silverlight. With the website’s back-end written in Java and much of the user interface built with JSP, MLB.com is not your typical candidate for adopting Microsoft’s newest technology for building Rich Internet Apps. Henry Belmont and Thaniya Keereepart share the reasoning behind choice and implementation details.
