Going Modern

Rob Gagne (Nexaweb SVP Software & Services) and Dave Jilk (CEO of Standing Cloud, Inc.) delivered a webinar this week on using the cloud as a platform for modernizing legacy software applications to the web.

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The current state of affairs has most organizations asking IT to build business cases for new expenditures, especially when it comes to updating an application that isn’t necessarily broken.  For IT, broken tends to mean that an application is getting harder to find resources to keep it current, maintenance is time consuming, and the technology it’s built on can’t support the features the business is asking for.  For the business, it’s about revenue.  If an application gives them what they need, let’s them do their job, it works.  However, if they feel the application is holding them back and keeping them from realizing the most revenue possible, it gets top modernization priority. For example several of our most recent banking customers want to leverage existing back office systems (e.g. pricing engines) to extend their global trading systems to external traders, partners and banking customers. This drives significant revenue by dramitically increasing transaction volume and customer satisfaction through eCommerce.

When a decision is made to modernize, the discussion always get political.  Some folks are in favor of building their own application to ensure it serves their business, while others feel the cost savings of going with a Commercial Off-the-shelf Software (COTS) solution is a no brainer.  The build vs. buy dilemma is as old and stubborn as PowerBuilder, Visual Basic and C++ themselves.  Neither approach is wrong, but all have their drawbacks.  Modernizing an application using in-house resources ensures that specific features and functionality will be included, but not without a cost.  A COTS solution can dramatically reduce the costs, but tends to require a trade off of features and functions leaving the business without any real advantage or edge.   So, what’s the answer?  That’s a million dollar question, and a puzzle more and more organizations are having to solve.  How are you approaching modernization at your organization?  Is revenue driving final decisions?  What are your thoughts on the build vs. buy question?

Chris Heidelberger, CEO, Nexaweb

I just presented a tutorial on Friday on using Direct Web Remoting, Hibernate and dojo.E.  It’s a very simple demo, but demonstrates the power of these three technologies combined to create simple, dynamic Java applications very quickly. The tutorial is available on SlideShare.

Note that there is a bug that obscures the URL for the SVN project.  The URL is http://source.nexaweb.com/svn/repos/trunk/tutorials/ajax/DWRExample/.

You can check out the project via SVN using this URL.

Also, to copy and paste the code snippets, download the document and open directly in PowerPoint. When copying and pasting, watch out for “smart quotes”. Some of the quotation characters in the PPT have been replaced with “smart quotes”, which are not recognized by XML parsers.

This will get even more exciting with the new features of DWR 3.0, which will add a RESTful layer to DWR’s remoting.  To learn more about DWR 3.0, I recommend Joe Walker’s presentation from The Ajax Experience last week.  He’s the lead developer for DWR.

Joel Barciauskas

What is it?

HorizontalBoxContainer and VerticalBoxContainer is a pair of layout managers that allow multiple children components to be laid out either vertically or horizontally. This is similar to BoxLayout from the Java Swing toolkit.

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Legacy applications are an even bigger headache than was originally thought. The announcement of Nexaweb Advance has generated huge attention in the media and has caused a 400% jump in traffic to www.nexaweb.com over a normal 5 day period. Check out some of the coverage below:

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We’ve been working hard on a new version of our development environment and we’re releasing a beta into the world.

Some highlights:

1. Data, data, data - all work flows that interact with data integration have been overhauled
2. Supporting users that have their own Eclipse environment and don’t want ours
3. Editing our “macros” - declarative modification blocks that can be executed on the client
4. Supporting JSON visualization for data sources
5. Results from usability testing has been added in
6. and more…

If you would like to take the beta for a spin, email our support department.

Rob Gagne

I have spent the last few weeks building examples using XML on top of dojo, including an XML version of the mail application (you can see it here http://trac.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/5766).

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