the business of technology blog
What’s in your toolkit?
December 2nd, 2011 @ 04:24pm
It used to be that we needed to carry around our box of 5 1/4″ floppys with all of the possible utilities that we’d need for a given day’s development work. That gave way to 3 1/2″ disks, CD’s, and now our own laptops, tablets, and flash drives. At this point I find that when working with customers, I can most often use my laptop which gives me access to the myriad of tools which I’ve acquired over the years. Still, sometimes, there will be situations where you’re constrained to be only within the client’s environment and your machine cannot be used. Even in those circumstances, you can usually plug in a flash-drive to exchange files.
So that all leads me here: sometimes you want to look at a database but cannot get access to the appropriate client. It just isn’t installed on the machine that you’re using, and you can’t remote to any machine that has it either. Enter “Query ExPlus“. This is a wonderful, self-contained 176K executable which lets you connect to SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, and OLEDB databases. This tool is like a mini-SQL Management studio and the real beauty of it is that you can run it from a flash drive! There’s no installation required. Granted, it isn’t as fast or fully-featured as OEM front-ends, but it is a real life-saver when those tools aren’t available.
Query ExPlus is an Open Source application available on SourceForge here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/queryexplus/ as such, there’s minimal documentation and only community support is available.
I highly recommend you keep this one handy for the times when you just have to peek into that database but can’t, or don’t want the overhead of installing SQL Management Studio or another heavyweight DB UI.
Balsamiq Mockups: A kinder, gentler wireframing tool?
August 18th, 2011 @ 07:43pm
Wireframes: as architects we all need to develop them. The question revolves around what tool to use. There are many schools of thought on this which range from the paper and pencil/pen method all the way up to creating a working prototype in your development tool of choice. I’ve fallen victim to using all of these methods and usually end up somewhere in the middle and spending too much time throwing together a mock-up which has to be tweaked a bunch before it is approved anyway.
Enter Balsamiq Studios (http://balsamiq.com) with Balsamiq Mockups, their Rapid Wireframing tool. Mockups gives you one step above paper and pencil mockups without having to do real development work to get your wireframes built. It gives you the ability to easily put together “low-fi”, sketch-type screens and build rudimentary interactions between them.
Mockups comes with several pre-built elements to make your life easier. There are menus, icons, lists, grids, textboxes and many many more. The application includes elements for client applications, web applications, mobile devices and you can download more from users who’ve shared ones they’ve built themselves from Balsamiq’s MockUpsToGo (http://mockupstogo.net) site. The elements all work as you’d expect. For example when you create a menu, you can choose a “selected” item and when you preview the wireframe, that item is appropriately highlighted. The toolbox also includes various “markup” elements which allow you to put callouts, sticky notes, and other information on the mockups. These can be used as reminders to ask questions or to clarify uses of the other screen elements when demonstrating the wireframe.
Each mockup is a single screen and is saved in its own file. All of the screens associated with an application are saved in a single filesystem folder. Almost any element you place on a mockup has the ability to link to another mockup. Another nice feature is that you can create a blank mockup, or copy the one you’re currently working on and use that as the basis for a new one. This copy feature is invaluable when linking mockups together so you don’t have to rebuild a mockup from scratch.
Once you have your wireframed application, you can preview it and walk through the screens using the links you’ve defined.
The product operates on all the usual platforms, exports to PNG, PDF, or XML formats. The Export function will also export all of the mockups in a single folder in a one operation so that you don’t have to do each screen separately.
There are many more features that I’ve not touched on but, suffice it to say, Mockups is an excellent, rapid wireframing tool which we’ll use over and over again as the starting point for our prototyping needs for the foreseeable future. This tool has become one of my favorites for the first steps in generating new prototypes. Lastly, its tongue-in-cheek user interface is great for developers. How many applications have a choice on the “help” menu that says “What should I make for dinner?”
Download the free 7-day trial and if you like it, buy it for $79, that’s cheap for what you get!
Enterprise Application Store & The Purposed Application
February 1st, 2011 @ 07:18pm
The iPhone App Store and similar mobile store models from Android and Blackberry have experienced tremendous consumer acceptance. Total downloads from the iPhone App Store alone recently crossed the ten billion mark. Applications come in all varieties and mash up a set of capabilities that deliver rich user experiences. The category of applications that has seen the highest adoption is social platform tools like FaceBook, Twitter and FourSquare. This rapid consumer adoption is now crossing over into the enterprise as business and IT organizations are being faced with the challenges of supporting this new class of mobile worker.
The one common element of App Store applications is that they are purposed for a specific target solution. Enterprise applications, on the other hand, tend to incorporate the full functionality of a business process within their design. Organizations that have taken the first step to extract important business functionality from existing applications have turned to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SOA model enables the decomposition and access to business logic and data layers – enabling externalization of the most critical functions. This results in the ability to share services across the enterprise as well as externally to partners and others within the organization’s business ecosystem.
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Integrating with Cloud-Based Applications: Where should I host it?
December 11th, 2010 @ 08:45pm
One of the trends we’re seeing recently is a growing business need for integrating internal business applications and data with cloud-based applications. Our experience in this space is mostly with SFA & CRM applications and, of course, the ubiquitous Google applications and services. As these applications are often targeted at the sales force, there are moderate numbers of users (100s-10s of thousands) with high availability requirements.
SOA is the de facto standard for integration with most cloud-based applications, so there’s no real architectural barrier to integrating with them – no matter where you host.
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