Build a stable and agile software foundation in a dynamic IBM i and Microsoft world.

By David Brault

Editor's note: This article provides a summary insight into the white paper The Eight Pillars of An Enterprise Application Architecture. The full white paper can be accessed for free by clicking here.

Imagine your worst nightmare comes true. Your new boss starts today, and 15 minutes into his tenure, he calls you to request, "Please come to my office in 30 minutes and bring the company's official application architecture and guidelines document with you." What would your application architecture document look like? For me, I'd most likely spend my last 30 minutes of employment Googling "application architecture" and pasting excerpts from the search results into a document before security escorts me out the door.

Big gains can be realized by focusing on what RPG programmers actually do.

By Steve Kilner

For the past few decades, while software development has traveled through a long list of new languages and methodologies, a lesser-known journey has been underway: seeking to maintain all the software already created. In the field of software maintenance, an important discipline, often labeled "program comprehension," has developed.

How can you keep "scope creep" and "feature creep" under control?

By Colleen Garton

Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from Fundamentals of Technology Project Management published by MC Press.

As managers, project management might be one of the most difficult things we do. If you came to management from a developer's role, managing a project that is being developed by others on your staff can be a daunting challenge. This article will give you some direction on best practices in managing project scope.

With proper planning, you can ensure a smooth system integration project.

By Marty Acks

So, your next big project is to integrate one of your existing systems with another system of which you may or may not have in-depth knowledge. In today's fast-paced development world, new projects involve more than simply writing the next killer app. System integration projects run the gamut from exposing applications or data to the Web (often referred to as application modernization), to integrating new software packages with existing systems, or to blending applications because of a recent merger.

By Joe Pluta

I've been writing about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for some time now. I did a complete review of the state of the technology in an article I wrote back in November of 2004. In that article, I commented that SOA is really the latest version of client/server technology, except that it had already been saddled with a couple of pieces of ungainly baggage, namely Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). In the article, I noted that UDDI was useless and that SOAP had a couple of contenders, and I predicted that SOA would evolve away from reliance on those technologies.

Why do so many applications perform so poorly? And what can be done to change that?

Testing applications for performance and scalability has become an afterthought in the software development community. According to Forrester Research, nearly 85 percent of large companies (more than $1 billion in revenue) have reported incidents of significant application performance problems. Why is this is happening? How can we improve this state of affairs?

Let's take both a practical and theoretical look at three of today's most primitive data structures.

Weren't algorithms and data structures and their relatives your favorite engineering-related courses? For many of us, probably not! These were typically the "right of passage" courses in most computer science and engineering programs. That is, once you passed these courses, you were officially part of the program.

Unfortunately, the theory surrounding these "primitive" data structures can be among the first topics to escape our minds. This article aims to refresh the minds of both the experienced practitioner and the fresh graduate about some of the theory behind the data structures that we frequently use. I'll also offer some examples of where such structures may be found in the real world.