Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Tubular Computing AOpen Systems has just launched the world's first vacuum tube-based motherboard. It looks as though Mr. Thomas Edison was really on to something with those glass and wire bobbles. In this case, tubes create an unmistakable warmth of tone that no solid state technology can touch...remember your favorite Fender amp? Ok, no one but gamers and audiophiles will want one, but still, it's good to see a company daring to look backward in order to leap forward. Posted by Brad Shimmin at 5:32:49 PM   comment on this post  >>[]

AOL IM in a suit? AOL sets sights on businesses. Through a division called AOL Strategic Business Solutions, the Internet titan is quietly preparing to sell its Internet software for corporate use. [CNET News.com] Don MacVittie is looking into this to see just how far AOL will go in securing and managing its Instant Messaging server. Stay tuned. Posted by Brad Shimmin at 5:15:40 PM   comment on this post  >>[]

Looking for enterprise gold in the Open Source/Open Standards arena Good day everyone. I'm pleased to post here a message from our very own Don MacVittie, outlining (literally) his research into Open Source as a replacement for that awful, "proprietary" stuff. Enjoy. Not too long ago, a midsize corporation asked me to lend them a hand evaluating Open Source and Open Standards alternatives to their current proprietary client/server environment. Since there's not a lot available about this type of research, we decided to 'blog it for you, so you can reap the benefits of our labor. The scope of the research is pretty simple -- given a three-year window, does moving from the existing environment to an Open environment offer a savings? This is a little vague, so the first thing we (there are three of us -- myself, one of the company's network admins and one of the company's client/server developers) did was attempt to put some real requirements and scope around this statement. The applications being targeted include internal, low-to-mid-volume Web-based applications and integration applications. Nothing exposed on the Internet and nothing with a higher average volume than several hundred users per hour. So, our research will encompass the following: We are looking to replace the entire Web development architecture   - Web servers   - Application servers   - Web development tools (programmer and designer) The proposed solution(s) must be operating system independent   - Must support Windows and Linux at a minimum Must be standards compliant   - SOAP   - HTML   - Java2   - XML   - WSDL   - UDDI -- possibly. We're not seeing a need at this time. The proposed solution must have some ease of use. We will evaluate:   - Development tool integration with Web server   - Development tool integration with app server   - Support of commonly used languages and scripting:       + Java       + JavaScript       + Perl       + PHP       + CSS       + HTML   - Object deployment and reuse:       + Web services       + J2EE - Completeness of coverage -- what holes are there that the company does not have today? Since they can be handled at either the OS or the hardware level, high-availability and clustering are not required. Also, since the applications are neither high-volume nor 24x7, this requirement is lower anyway. To evaluate costs over three years we will include:   - Initial software investment   - Annual maintenance   - Training:       + Application developers       + Support staff       + Web page designers Next up: Tracking down the products and figuring out the "street" costs. --Don Posted by Brad Shimmin at 12:09:39 AM   comment on this post  >>[]