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It’s no longer news that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a booming industry. We learned last year that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion planned to adopt one or more SaaS applications this year. And Gartner projects that 25% of all new business software (CRM, ERP, SCM, etc.) will be delivered by means of SaaS by 2011.

What’s becoming news is what’s happening online. We’ve talked here before about the influence of Web 2.0 on CRM development. And the social networking achievements on the Web are compelling, especially as they suggest methods for delivering better customer service.

Datamonitor recently suggested in a report on the pharmaceutical industry that it should develop online communities as a tool for learning about its customers. Datamonitor predicts that in the future, the focus of CRM will move beyond managing customer relationships towards community-building and support.

More than a decade ago Sun Microsystems proclaimed that “the network is the operating system.” Software developers are of course attuned to the development path and behavior of operating systems, since this is where their users and their applications will work together. It should be no surprise that the Internet, as the largest network ever created, demonstrates almost daily new and original uses of applications. Here at Dovetail we take note of these innovations.

The forces at work on the evolution of software are fairly massive, in today’s connected global operating system. Microsoft may yield its original configuration to better online operators, with services reduced precisely to majority needs, or perhaps, to a degree, configurable on-demand. At the same time its original software may unlock so much new value that it occupies or dominates an entirely new market, especially as Microsoft becomes increasingly visible in the CRM field.

The message is: Build in .NET and be able to embrace more services, applications, resources and data.

Dovetail Software’s platform is .NET, as many of you know. We wrote our applications from scratch to run on .NET, precisely because of the ease of integration and rapid development this platform affords. Like Microsoft, we’ve been quietly developing our software (in policy if not in code) according to SOA principles for a long time now. Our architecture allows users of Clarify™ data to create hybrid applications, for example, using Web services for customized data access.

One of our customers who deployed our SDK development platform reports satisfaction in using the Dovetail Web Services because of its ability to “Respond to Market Changes Quickly”. They also praised WebLogic/SOAP/.NET because of its ability to connect with multiple databases and systems to obtain customer information such as loyalty points, service order history, etc. Essentially they can provide each of their agents a portal view across multiple customer data sources.

We developed our applications because we believe that Amdocs is ill equipped to service the evolving needs of the Clarify install base for thin clients, Web portals, and remote data access. But there are two sides to the SOA coin.

But how good is Kaspersky?? Is it better than AVG? My McAfee subscription will be up in a few months and Im going to want to try something that doesnt hog resources and slow my system down. It also must be able to protect me and give me network info of my home network. Anything like that?
well several reviews i have seen state that kaspersky will spot more viruses even when the signatures are more then 2 months old, and with my own test with my viruse collection it recognized 96.7% nortons and mcafee were under 90%.
the newest version of zonealarm uses kaspersky for its antivirus engine.
if you don’t need a firewall then just get the kaspersky antivirus they just released version 7.
as well kaspersky does hourly updates.

Using AVG FREE for well over 5 years now, you may have 0 problems.  I also use Lavasoft AD-Aware 2007, also FREE and Zone Alarm  .. also FREE - I have a Dell Dimension 2350 so you should know how old my system is and it runs beautifully.

AVG is very light on system resources, you’ll never know it’s running unless a full scan is in progress.

well to answer your question is that software companies pay the hardware companies money to put there software on to your system.

i would suggest that if you haven’t already done so remove mcafee.

i use spy sweeper with antivirus make no mistake its not a replacement for a real antivirus program. live one care its a microsoft product and i really don’t care for it. there are several free antivirus programs that work just as well as the big boys (mcafee, nortons) in catching and removing viruses.

if you need a firewall zonelabs - zonealarm is a good one and its free there is a paid version as well, the paid aka pro version comes with kaspersky antivirus included. if you do buy a new antivirus check out there forums if there’s issues users will post, that’s one good way to know if its truly vista compatible.

We all know that there’s only one John Chow and Darren Rowse. They were pioneers in what they did. They devised strategies and spend money on them and received the returns. To get inspired from them is fair enough. But there has to be some amount of honesty in what you blog about and what you deliver to your readers. Having a blog with no traffic at all and writing about how to boost your traffic in 6 days is like fooling readers.

I mean, come on, we all are looking for the same thing all along. More traffic, more readers, more subscribers, more ads, more link buys, more cash, more Adsense revenues, and more popularity. Not everybody will get everything. Its a fact. So digest it and be honest.

If you want traffic, just do what you know and get the traffic first. If you are writing a blog to make money online, make some money first. Write about how you got it done. Display a scanned picture of the bill on the header of your blog, that’ll makes more sense. Doesn’t it?

Oh no! Not again.

This is the initial reaction when you visit those new blogs with the tag line - Make money online. Ironical isn’t it?

First off, this guy has a brand new blog, he’s only 16, he does not have a credit card, he has no ad spaces on the blog, nobody has ever bought any links/ad space, and….. he hasn’t made any money online yet. Then what the hell is he going to advice others on making money online ?

Weird. Why do people start off with this tag line - make money online? Yea, it may be one of the most searched keywords on the net but, but..but…hasn’t there to be a justification to why you blog ?

As I understand, in their endeavors to make money online, people just manage to create a blog and post along. Good idea but it’s kind of frustrating to see a blog with posts on “how to get more traffic to your blog” and in effect with no or very less traffic. I think being honest can fetch you more readers than trying to boast about something that you are not.

What is surprising about Junit is the religious aspect of it. For example, some comment on a blog a few weeks back had someone spouting shite like ‘well I’m not a zealot or anything, but I would never use code with no unit tests, it works by accident not design’. What’s particularly sickening about this is the fuckfaced disclaimer up front. It puts the whole thing right up there with such gems as ‘Well I’m no racist but those niggers…’ and ‘I’m no bible thumper but YOUR ALL BURNING IN HELL YOU GODDAM ABORTION LOVING BABYKILLERS’ (Note: The typo is deliberate).

Surprisingly, the developer world hobbled along quite successfully before junit. Huge portions of it keep on hobbling that way with astounding success. See, what people seem to have forgotten is that a unit test does not mandate junit. It’s the approach that matters. Coverage reports are there to make things more sexually stimulating, they’re NOT a fundamental part of the approach. You could have plenty of unit tests that are nothing more that main methods in your various implementation classes. That still has its value, and certainly is more useful than no tests at all.

The JUnit fetishists are the freakiest of them all. What’s impressive is that they’ve invented this whole new universe just to justify what a horrifically broken tool they’ve staked their careers on (yes thoughtworks fuckstains, I’m pointing and laughing at you, you dirty chozgobbling rumprangers). Need static initialisation for shared or expensive resources? Not possible in Junit! Therefore, it’s evil! if you need to do it you’re broken!

The same goes for anyone who ever expresses any need for something beyond one method one test. Why the religious zealotry here? We all write code every day that requires more than one method, so why can’t our tests function similarly? Why is it so unthinkable that there might be some element of good unit testing that are not fully captured by JUnit?

The sickest joke in all this is how badly JUnit itself is written. Just read some of the javadocs and inline comments, they make it fairly clear that a fairly liberal amount of drugs had been imbibed in the course of writing it all.

So I ask you, all of you who want nothing more in life than to bend over and have JUnit plug all your orifices, why? What do you get out of it? Why this sickening allegiance to a flawed, old, unmaintained, and dysfunctional tool?

I beg of you all, don’t use JSF, boycott it, avoid it all you can. Do not let it thrive or prosper. We don’t want it improved or tweaked, we want it to die the horrible painful death it so richly deserves. I can see the argument that the platform needs something like it. Taking struts and turning it into a specification is not the answer. The JSF group is in many ways much less constrained that the EJB group by backward compatibility. The few people who have chosen to adopt JSF can be (rightfully) dismissed as lunatics who expect to jump through hoops for every iteration anyway. Mission-critical JSF is practically an oxymoron, and there are many many great ideas in the community that should be leveraged and incorporated. Tainting the J2EE 5.0 spec with something so untested and universally reviled by the hardcore enterprise people, bread and butter webapp folk, and the hobbyist web monkey kids will do the the entire platform a great disservice.

So I beg of you all, don’t use JSF, boycott it, avoid it all you can. Do not let it thrive or prosper. We don’t want it improved or tweaked, we want it to die the horrible painful death it so richly deserves.

I can see the argument that the platform needs something like it. Taking struts and turning it into a specification is not the answer. The JSF group is in many ways much less constrained that the EJB group by backward compatibility. The few people who have chosen to adopt JSF can be (rightfully) dismissed as lunatics who expect to jump through hoops for every iteration anyway. Mission-critical JSF is practically an oxymoron, and there are many many great ideas in the community that should be leveraged and incorporated. Tainting the J2EE 5.0 spec with something so untested and universally reviled by the hardcore enterprise people, bread and butter webapp folk, and the hobbyist web monkey kids will do the the entire platform a great disservice.

The whole existence of J2EE 5.0 stems from the needs of the community and the developers on the ground. Virtually every single specification under that umbrella has been revved either through pressure from users, or with the goal of allowing users to do what they do better. The one amazing exception to this rule is Java Server Faces. To date, I have yet to see a single positive review of this spec that comes from a non-Struts user. WebWork, Tapestry, Spring, and pretty much every non-Struts framework users scoff and laugh at JSF. It’s ugly, it’s not intuitive, and it is hellbent on the Microsoft style approach; fuck the users and force them to use clever tools.

While this wouldn’t have been surprised a year or two ago (many of the specs were run the same way, driven by a few lunatics with bizarre needs rather than actual Real People), it is simply unacceptable these days.

I won’t go into the details of why JSF is crap.

It looks like the Java6 (or rather, Java SE 6 as the marketing gods will insist from now on) people have finally joined the moron parade that is the rest of the java community.

The particular idiocy that has resulted in wise men everywhere losing bowel control is the embedded javascript engine.

Why, in the name of all that is pink and fluffy in this world, does java need this? How many times have you bastards thought ‘god, I’d use java, if only it had a javascript engine that didn’t require that I download a jar’?

What’s even more incredible that this spastic idea is the reception it’s received. I’ve always been bitter about how retarded most java bloggers are, but the number of people who have happily drooled onto the ether about what a great idea this is (without ever, ever presenting a coherent or intelligible reason as to why) is flabbergasting. The idiocy of the masses is one thing, but to have so many individuals spontaneously display their genitalia all aquiver over such a pointless exercise is inexplicable, to put it mildly.

Even more astounding is the fact that the html engine in the JDK still can’t render anything more advanced than HTML 3, yet we have a bunch of filthy unemployed drama queens cooing about how great and important javascript support is.

The scripting host engine I can somewhat tolerate. After all, the scripting crowd is loud and obnoxious and easily appeased, so might as well toss them a bone (or two) to insert into the odd orifice (or two) to pacify them. No doubt, in typical JDK team manner, they’ll still work hard to mangle it up and not bother talking to anyone about how classloading actually works and demand all sorts of command line switches and sacrificing of children to the classloader pantheon.

The idiocy of course doesn’t stop there. We now have a ‘lightweight’ embedded http server. I suppose SE 7 will include tomcat eh? Maybe merge EE and SE, while we’re at it! Who needs something you can download in mere hours, when you can wait days for the joy of something you never even asked for in the first place!

The next talk I attended was a bit of a black sheep. It’s a J2ME talk for one, and for another, it’s not really about technology, code, or some guy flapping about helplessly at his IDE while we all patiently wait for something vaguely noteworthy to happen.

Despite the incoherent and faintly pretentious title, the talk, I grudgingly admit, is pretty good. Grudgingly, because I don’t like Eugene as a person (at least, on irc), he’s a little too creepy/nice/full of shit for my taste. As a speaker though, he’s interesting, engaging, and able to communicate in a non ‘gosh I’m a tech dude wtf am I doing up on a stage’ kinda style.

Still, personal feelings aside, he’s a rather good speaker, certainly compared to the competition so far. The talk is in fact also awfully interesting, since it deals with higher level issues surrounding J2ME.

Eugene covers all the pitfalls in the mobile Java ecosystem. These are often not technical, but political, or the result of various parties all eager to protect their turfs. I’m not an ME guy, so the talk was a bit of an eye opener onto that world. The ME world seems awfully full of NDAs, secretive partner deals, zealous API protectionist mentalities, and often trying to screw everyone both up and downstream of your slot in the stack in the aim of forcing the users to become coupled to your slice of the pie (whether it be OS, api, vendor, app vendor, retailer, etc).

There’s also an interesting discussion of a commercial application’s lifecycle, and how vendors and partners interact (with detrimental results) with various milestones of the process.

An interesting description of people’s interaction with mobile devices is to recognise and work with the fact that users exhibit ’snacking behaviour’, in terms of their expectations, demands, and usage. Applications that follow these principles are far more likely to succeed and result in happy user noises.