Enterprise Architecture

Struggling to get familiar with the new PowerBuilder.NET IDE and the technology it allows you to use (e.g., WPF, REST, WCF and the rest of the alphabet soup)? Then you should run, not walk, over to the free eTutorial series that Sybase just made available for PowerBuilder 12.5. The training was put together by Yakov Werde. Yakov, for those who may not have heard of him, is the managing partner of eLearnIT LLC. Prior to that he spent more than 10 years as a trainer for Sybase, teaching classes on PowerBuilder, Java and .NET. And before that he was a software developer like you and me using PowerBuilder. So he knows of what he speaks. (Yakov is also a regular author for PowerBuilder Developer's Journal and the ISUG Technical Journal, a member of TeamSybase and a PowerBuilder MVP.) As the term "eTutorial" implies, this is an online series. All you need to use to take ... (more)

Enterprise Security and Gaining Insightful Insight into “Insight”

Security specialists are fond of using expressions like "robust protection" and "multi-layered defenses" when it comes to setting out their stall and telling us exactly how they are able to protect our data and applications. Looking closer at enterprise security, we see that lower down the buzzword pecking order for some reason is the word "insight" in its various forms. It seems insight means more than one thing in information technology these days, but perhaps it's no coincidence that every meaning or interpretation of the term essentially falls somewhere under the umbrella of e... (more)

PaaS Best Practices : Platform for Hybrid SaaS

The GC Community Cloud ITSS documentation stipulates the Cloud service specifications that the Government of Canada plans to deploy, and can be used by external commercial providers as well as internally by Shared Services Canada users. They provide technical design blueprints for security configurations to ensure Cloud environments are compliant with Government of Canada standards. Primarily they can be used as industry-wide product specifications because they’re based on the NIST models that are now universally recognized as the default Cloud Best Practices, and relate to how s... (more)

DataWindow Sorting with Column Headers

This article describes how to create a grid presentation window that allows sorting by clicking on the column header. To begin we need to create a grid DataWindow. I'm selecting just a few columns from the employee table. Here is my sql for the DataWindow in Figure 1. Once we have created it I get the DataWindow painter shown in Figure 2. There are several changes that we need to make. Let's change the status column so it's no longer a set of radio buttons. This is a read-only screen so let's remove the status and add a computed field. To do this let's remove the Status column ... (more)

The Consumerization of IT – What It Means for the Architect

Consumerization is described as the trend for IT to first emerge in the Consumer space and subsequently makes its way into the enterprise world. But what exactly in the consumer world, that is making the users, demand the similar things from the enterprise IT. To understand the underlying need, we need to first examine the basic requirements of the user. Kathy Sierra, co-creator of the Head First series of books and founder of javaranch.com, describes the hierarchy of needs from the user(s) perspective. The needs are stacked in the order of increasing engagement from the user. S... (more)