SE News

The very success of information and communication technologies is becoming a problem. Millions of devices, countless interconnections, endless applications, and never-ending demands for integration are giving rise to complexity that we are finding harder and harder to manage. Certainly, we see more and more human resources being devoted to keeping the plates spinning. These skills are in short supply and cost an increasing proportion of any IT project.

Recently we have had a manifesto from IBM and statements from Microsoft that point in much the same direction, suggesting a challenging new approach involving autonomic computing and self-repairing systems. An increasing number of news articles are using these terms, and these topics are receiving wide coverage in journals and magazines. What are we to make of these new slogans? Do they amount to more than metaphorical mumbo jumbo?

http://computer.org/intelligent/homepage/x6eic.htm

In the OO (object-oriented) world, a factory is an object of a class specializing in the automated construction of objects of a different class. Most often, the construction of complex objects consists of assembling library components (objects of other classes, either belonging to the library or to third-party libraries). A class factory can construct many objects. These objects can be stored in persistent containers, in order to be used by different clients, or reused several times. The objects are associated with unique identifiers, in order to be identified and easily retrieved. The information required by the factory’s construction procedure (the build member function) can be passed to the factory object in many ways. An efficient way to do so is by structured XML files or strings.

This article describes a typical way of using factory objects to extract information from an XML source and to construct persistent objects for a specific task (to price financial contracts in this case).

http://www.cuj.com/webonly/2003/0302/web0302c/web0302c.htm

Everyone on a XP team must change the way they think. This article explores why customers (the business decision-makers) seem to have the most difficult time with this shift. Until they change the way they think about and participate in software projects, the end result will never be a satisfactory one.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-xp1210.html

Persistent data is at the heart of most enterprise applications, and Java provides a cavalcade of methods for retrieving and storing that data. The
method you choose to access data depends on a variety of factors. Is the data shared between multiple applications or used by a single program? Does the data exist and is it stored in a database, or will it be generated by the application and stored according to its requirements? Is the data a persistent store of program state or is it a queryable conglomeration of information? What are the expected read, update, insert, and remove operation frequencies? What is the volume of data? These are just a few of the questions that can help characterize the data access requirements of an application.

http://www.fawcette.com/javapro/2003_02/magazine/features/dsavarese/

Most requirements engineers are poorly trained to elicit, analyze, and specify security requirements, often confusing them with the architectural security mechanisms that are traditionally used to fulfill them. They thus end up specifying architecture and design constraints rather than true security requirements. This article defines the different types of security requirements and provides associated examples and guildlines with the intent of enabling requirements engineers to adequately specify security requirements without unnecessarily constraining the security and architecture teams from using the most appropriate security mechanisms for the job.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_01/column6

More and more organizations are realizing the benefits - and sometimes the necessity - of incorporating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products in the systems they acquire and use. But COTS products are not necessarily the right solution for every system. When is it wise to pursue a COTS-based systems approach, and when is it best to hold back? How can sound COTS- based-system practices be reconciled with an organization’s regulatory and policy constraints? This report provides some information to help guide these decisions

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/02.reports/02tr032.html

In this paper we try to clarify the issue of associations as a communication infrastructure between objects, in search for a unified view of the static and dynamic aspects of associations.

Communication through associations depends on navigability and visibility, therefore the interlacement of these two concepts is examined. But first the very definition of navigability has to be settled, since the concept of navigability of associations in UML is poorly explained in the official documentation. The coherent representation of the sending of messages in different UML diagrams helps to better understand the underlying metamodel and shows that a link in a collaboration diagram is not always an instance of an association.

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_01/article3

Sun has recently released version 0.75 of the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), as well as its reference implementation.

JAXB consists of two parts. First, JAXB contains a compiler that reads a schema and produces the equivalent Java object model. This generated object model captures the structure of XML better than general-purpose APIs like DOM or SAX, making it a lot easier to manipulate XML content.

The second part is an API, through which applications communicate with generated code. This API hides provider-specific implementation code from applications and also provides a uniform way to do basic operations, such as marshalling or unmarshalling.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/01/08/jaxb-api.html

Thin Client Framework (TCF) is a design, development, and deployment approach for easily and rapidly developing high-functioning, extendable, and responsive e-business clients in the Java language. TCF builds on the Model-View-Controller design pattern and raises it to the level of an application architecture. Through consistent implementation of an event-based communication model, TCF provides a highly pluggable, component-based structure for client-side application development.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-tcf1/

Web services promise to simplify business programming and to improve interoperability, but they won’t deliver on these promises without effective security. Written by the leading security experts in the field, this innovative book clearly shows how to build a real-world, secure Web services system. Using theory, examples, and practical advice, the authors examine each of the security technologies used for providing secure Web services, emphasizing how security works with XML and SOAP. And with the help of two case studies, you’ll also learn how to effectively plan and deploy a secure Web services system for both J2EE and .NET.

http://www.wiley.com/cda/product/0,,0471267163,00.html

The Business IT Alignment (bITa) Conference Europe 2003 highlights business IT alignment as a set of relationships among strategies and structures and is the premier European conference for senior IT executives and professionals, who want to take a systematic and structural approach to improving people, process, and technology at their organizations.

http://www.bita-europe.com/

De IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance wordt dit jaar gehouden in Amsterdam, van 22 tot 26 september. Het is de grootste conferentie over software onderhoud, evolutie en management. Het thema dit jaar is de “architectuur van bestaande systemen”.

U wordt niet alleen uitgenodigd om de conferentie bij te wonen, maar ook om een bijdrage te leveren in de vorm van een research paper, fast-track paper, of presentatie. Zie de ICSM 2003 website voor de details. De deadline voor bijdragen is 1 maart 2003.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/icsm2003/

In dit themanummer van Informatie alles over het beheren van documenten gedurende hun complete levenscyclus. Mediumneutrale opslag. XML in alle smaken. En cases van KPN en Océ. Een beetje houvast voor het legioen van (her)inrichters van documentinfrastructuren.

http://www.informatie.nl/