Max King

Your team has just spent several months hammering out an enterprise-critical application and it feels as if you've been on the hot seat forever. The once vibrant and enthusiastic development team now resembles the cast of "Thriller" as they burn the midnight oil night after night. Finally, the finish line is in front of you - you just need to cross it and relax into maintenance mode. The client and management wait in anticipation. You flip the go-live switch, logs start to fill up, users start to log on, Operations pats you on the back, and all systems are go - or so you thought. How long will it be before you get that all-too-familiar call from the customer? What exactly went wrong? Three weeks of root-cause analysis and four specialist consultants later, the executive summary is: "D'oh!" Do these sound familiar? "The server license expired." "The LDAP server has b... (more)

Make All Available to All

As your company makes more of its applications available on the Web, you will need to determine the level of accessibility for each of those applications. The term accessibility describes how IT hardware, software, and services address and/or neglect the needs of a user community, including users with disabilities. To achieve this aim, accessible applications often include or interface with assistive technology such as screen reader software, voice recognition, screen magnifiers, and special keyboards. For WebSphere Web- and applet-based applications, accessibility compliance is ... (more)

Migration: From Here to There to WebSphere

Why migrate to WebSphere v5? Whether you are currently using WebSphere v3.5 or v4, or are using a different J2EE application server altogether, there are many reasons that justify the move. First there is the corporate choice - when choosing WebSphere you are choosing IBM. This means that you benefit from their reputation for superior support and their rather vast portfolio of software options. You also benefit from the level of investment they are putting into WebSphere, which equals more than the annual revenues of some of their competitors. Next there is the technology choice.... (more)