Exercise 10

1. Go to the website of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase.

The followings are some application servers in competition with ZOPE:

• EAServer version 5.2 of SyBase;
• JBoss version 5.0.0 Beta released on 10 Feb 2008;
• IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1 released on May 26, 2006;
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 released on 3 December 2007.

The development cycle of Internet Software is much shorter than other business software. Those giant internet software companies like Google would conduct real time monitoring on user behaviour to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. Some a web developer of online services reckons that they would put new features on their sites every day for users to try. If users like the new features, they would leave them. Otherwise, the new features would be removed. Similarly, Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr remarked that they deploy new build up to half an hour (O’Relly, 2005). Regarding other business software, their development cycle is in years.


2. Why is the perception getting stronger that integration will become a critical factor in coming days? What is the role of AJAX within the enterprise software architecture?

The reasons that IBM website, and found that they do mention data management associated with e-commerce and they even publish a paper “Customer Care Solutions for the Communications Industry - Driving Business Value with Master Data Solutions”.

Regarding open source software, IBM foresees a great potential in their development. That is reason IBM joined EnterpriseDB’s C round of venture financing which in total raises US$10 million for the open source database vendor in March 2008 (Kerner, 2008).

The role of AJAX within the enterprise software architecture, organizations need a usable front-end, or interfaces, that allows business users to fully exploit the full benefits of a service-oriented framework. This is no small issue, as it is critical for users across the extended enterprise to be able to easily access and interact with the resources within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in order to make a difference in how they work. For that, they need a user-interface that does what they need from a business standpoint, but is also flexible and cost effective from an IT standpoint.

In my opinion, AJAX rich application interfaces are clearly the best tool out there for putting together a front-end that lets companies really go to town with a service based approach to integrating online information.

3. What are the similarities between the object-oriented development using model-view-controller (MVC) in Ruby on Rails 2.0 and Action Script 2.0 (Flash animations)?

The reason that for stronger perception that integration will be a critical factor in coming days are summarized below (Nah & LAU, 2001):

• the growing need to anticipate, response and react the growing demands of marketplace or perish;
• fiercely competition environment among companies globally;
• business success and survival are determined by effective business strategy centres on aggressive and effective use of information technology;

The role of ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning are to:

• automate and integrate business processes in an organization;
• share use of common data and methods across the entire organization;
• generate, update and access information in a real-time mode.

ActionScript 2.0 is an object-oriented is a formal and familiar approach to object-oriented programming (OOP) which including full support for classes, inheritance, interfaces and other common OOP concepts. OOP is an option approach to developing applications by using an additional set of language elements (DeHaan, 2005). But In Ruby everything is an object (Alameda, 2008).