During this week Technical Leadership Exchange, attendants could take up to three product certification tests for free. On day 1 I decided to take the “Developing WebServices with Rational Developer 6.0” exam since it was a topic I was quite familiar with. I found the exam to be pretty easy, specially considering the fact that many questions were related and that some questions provided the answer to others.
The same day I passed that exam, one of the members of my team failed the “DB2 version 9 fundamentals exams”. That was totally unexpected, since he is an experienced Information Management IT Specialist. I decided to take the same test the next day to find out how hard the exam really was. Just for the record, most of my database experience has been working with Informix. I am a DB2 certified professional but I took the exam four years ago with version 7.1 and I have never installed or used DB2 version 9. To make thing worse, I had to complete the exam in 45 minutes (instead of 90) because I was running late for dinner. So, how did I do? Not extremely well, but I was able to pass the exam.
So, how is it possible that I could pass the exam while a more experience engineer failed. One explanation is the test’s heavy focus on SQL. Despite being called DB2 fundamentals, few questions are really DB2 specific. Anyone with a solid SQL knowledge can obtain a good score even without having used that particular database engine. That is a serious problem, we cannot expect employers to know the contents of a particular exam. We should expect the title of the certification to clearly describe the skills being tested. However, that does still not explain why an experienced professional can fail such a test. The answer is quite simple, English fluency. Most product certification tests tend to be quite confusing with many answer options looking very similar. That is fine if English is your primary language, but not for those who are not fluent in English.
I feel that this is unfair. Although I do not care much about product certification when evaluating candidates, many managers do. Candidates who do not speak English well are being double taxed, first when being evaluated on their foreign languages skills and later when asked about their technical skills. Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if the fact that a country like India is known for the technical skills of it’s people this is due to the fact all students speak English and therefore have easier access to technical information. Having lived in many countries around the world I can tell you that, in my experience, stupidity is evenly distributed and so is intelligence.
So, what is the solution? For starters, product certification tests should be available in multiple languages. This shouldn’t represent a large effort for companies such as Cisco, IBM or Sun. I am convinced that if this happened, the number of certified engineers in regions like Latin America, Europe and Asia would rise dramatically, unveiling new business opportunities in countries that currently are not seen as investment worthy.
However, that is obviously not enough. Universities in non-English speaking countries should acknowledge how key the proficiency in English is to their student’s success. Unfortunately, in many countries national pride is preventing government from taking serious actions. This is too bad as it is taking away opportunities from people that truly deserve them.
Leo Laporte has been pushing lately for renaming podcasts as netcasts. He argues that non technical people believe that they need an iPod to listen to podcasts and that this limits the potential audience of podcasts. I am not convinced. By looking at my logs, I know that I have IT Insight listeners who download the show using Juice as well as other alternatives to iTunes. Of course, most of my listeners use iTunes, but this only reflects the size of the market share that the iPod has captured.
However, this is not the whole story. Leo Laporte also argues that the dominance of iTunes is bad for podcasters. He seems to believe that a more fragmented market is better for podcasters. He goes as far as asking help from Microsoft to fight Apple dominance. This is ridiculous, it is like asking a wolf for help to keep the sheep under control.
As a podcaster who gets most of my traffic through iTunes, I understand why he may want to depend less on Apple. If your podcast is not featured regularly on the iTunes store or your podcast does not appear in the Top 100 list, you are out of luck and it is hard to get people to listen to your shows. However, Leo can hardly complain from lack of cooperation from Apple as they regularly feature TWiT and MacBreak among their top picks.
So, the question is, what does he expect from a fragmented market? Probably more power for podcasters. It is well known that he is currently in the process of building a network of podcasts and he probably would like people to go to his network page to select their content from a limited number of channels instead of a large directory containing thousands of podcasts where his products can easily get lost.
Will it help if Microsoft gets into the game? Most likely not. Instead of a de facto monopoly we will get either a duopoly or a fragmented market. The difference is that instead of the benevolent dictatorship we have today, we will get a known monopolist who will fight for its own financial benefit, competing not only for hardware supremacy but also for revenue from its own content (think MSN, MSNBC, etc). The same applies to companies such as Time-Warner.
From my point of view, I largely prefer a neutral directory that dominates the market where it is difficult to compete, but everyone faces the same difficulties, over a myriad of services where only professional podcasters, with a enough resources to publicize their shows on all existing directories, can reach all the potential listeners. I also sincerely believe that this scenario is also worse for consumers, at least for now, since the technology is still in its infancy.
I do not think that asking Microsoft for help is particularly wise. They are not known for defending the community interests. Besides, they also have enough interests in the content market for us to expect them to be impartial. Yes, I know, so does Steve Jobs, but since Apple and Disney are separate companies, any coordinated move is likely to go through high scrutiny by investors.
Leo Laporte claims to defend the interests of the podcaster community. He certainly does not represent me. I feel that he has already lost a lot of credibility by endorsing Dell computers on his TWiT show, when everyone knows that he is a Mac user. This is even worse. I feel that he is pursuing his own interests by trying to gain independence from Apple. I do not criticize him for that. I simply believe he should be more open about his true motives.
I just posted the slides for a new episode of IT Insight. This time I will be talking about the WWDC. The podcast (in Spanish only, for now) will be available tomorrow morning. I hope you all enjoy it. In the next episode we will go back to architectural topics and I will cover what is known as Event Driven Architecture.
Yesterday I flew to Chihuahua (Northern Mexico) to participate in a roundtable about databases with Oracle and Microsoft representatives. The plane was slightly late and despite the best efforts of the organizers who got us (the Oracle Architect and myself) in a police car that raced us to the Convention Center we arrived a couple of minutes late. Unfortunately, the organizers, in order to stick to the schedule, had decided to start without us and replace us with with salespersons from our respective companies that were at hand on the exhibit floor.
Too bad because I was really looking forward to dicuss the subject of the future of databases. With three sales representatives on stage (MS had sent a Marketing Manager to talk about the matter) the conversation rapidly moved to mundane subjects such as price, support plans and training.
The truth is that such a discussion is really needed. Databases have gone from being the stars of the client/server era to become a commodity (at least in the eyes of many of my customers) in the Internet age. This doesn’t make any sense.
When we talk about SOA, the databases are almost a second thought. That is because in most cases the database never connects directly to the ESB. Instead, the data is exposed through services, normally hosted on an application server. This may change as people start talking about Event Driven Architecture. EDA is complementary to SOA as both rely on the use of an ESB and therefore are not mutually exclusive.
In a SOA environment, the ultimate goal is to allow enterprises to implement BPM (Busines Process Management). In this scenario, the business processes run outside the applications in a process engine that coordinates the enterprise services. The users interact with the processes, and processes, in general do start only in response to a user request.
With EDA, the IT community recognizes the limitations of some of these premises. We must acknowledge that in some cases, processes will have to start automatically in response to external signals coming from different types of systems ranging from SCADA devices to databases. Databases should be able to communicate events to the ESB. These event are the normal evolution of triggers. Today advanced databases can easily send events from a Java based trigger using JMS. However, I think that we need to move to a higher level of integration, such as the MQ datablade for Informix databases which allows to post MQ messages through a standard SQL call.
When we talk about modern architectures, such as SOA or EDA, XML and security are very important topics. Should we privilege XML storage and retrieval speed (as favoured by Oracle in its current database release) or XML processing speed (which IBM has achieved in its DB2 v.9 release). In most cases the later is far more important, but most of the general public does not understand the implications this has on application performance. Database security is changing very quickly too. We used to think of this topic as a totally separated from application security. Today we are moving to a single point of authentication using LDAP and databases have to be part of this new infrastructure.
The conclusion is databases are evolving fast to adapt to a quickly changing environment. Most programmers and DBAs seem however to have failed to keep up wih the changes. That is too bad because databases are at the cornerstone of any advanced IT infrastructure.
You can finally download the latest episode of IT Insight from iTunes. Even with my new Mac Book Pro, it still took me a lot of time to produce it. In this episode I discuss the challenges to develop a powerful web based presentation layer to an SOA based Entrerprise Application and some of the technologies that can help such as XForms or AJAX. Hope you all enjoy it.
I am back in the U.S.A. just a couple of days after returning from my trip to California. This time I had to travel to North Carolina to attend an IBM Technical Sales Managers meeting. The conference has been very informative so far, as I could learn from the wisdom of people who have spent much more time than I in this position. We even had some time to have fun at a place where we could race go-carts and play mini-golf.
However, the party was over at 10PM and it gave me some time to publish a new episode of IT Insight (Spanish). I will probably record the podcast tomorrow evening, so check iTunes on Thursday and you should get the new episode. Please send me your feedback.
After returning from WWDC I have started working on a new episode of IT Insight. I hope to record it next week in Durnham, NC while attending an IBM manager meeting. It will cover the different options available for developers and graphic designers who need to develop the presentation layer of a SOA application.
I was finally able to post the seventh episode of IT Insight (Spanish). It turns out that managers work much harder than previously thought 🙂 This episode is mostly about planning carefully an SOA implementation and avoiding common pitfalls. With this episode I think that I have covered the most important aspects of SOA for now. In the next episodes I will cover other aspects of enterprise computing. I will also publish a special podcast about Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) which I hope will be an exciting event.
A couple of days ago I attended a meeting of Java programmers sponsored by SUN to be part of a round-table discussion around SOA with people from BEA and other local companies. I had a lot of fun but this really isn’t the point of this entry.
During the discussion we were trying to explain what SOA was and how to design SOA based applications. What really stuck me was that we were all explaining how to implement and ESB from scratch and use it to create new applications designed from the beginning to use it.
The fact is that this is simply not true. SOA is not something that most people plan from scratch. What really happened is that in the late 90s, companies just started to lose faith in their IT departments. They started to buy ERP systems because they promised better reliability, functionality and performance. ERP and other CRM systems are the great failure of the corporate IT departments. Corporate developers in midsize companies could just not deliver the value their employers expected from them. As a result, the number of development jobs started shrinking.
However, the promise of ERPs did not hold totally true. Most companies need functionality not provided by their corporate systems and implementing it using BAPIs or other proprietary systems to extend them is normally much more expensive than doing it quickly in languages such as Java or PHP.
So, SOA is really the last chance for corporate developers to save their jobs. If they can use it to successfully provide additional functionality at a lower price than their ERP providers, then they can show value to their upper management and will probably be asked to continue developing. Otherwise corporate IT will lose their remaining developers and will finally be completely outsourced as systems administration is usually not strategic.
I got an email from Ana who disagreed with one of my statements over AJAX in my latest episode of IT Insight. What I said (translated from Spanish) was roughly:
“The MVC paradigm was designed to separate the application layer from the presentation layer. AJAX is a step back as it makes this virtually impossible”
She pointed out that the goal of AJAX is precisely to separate those two layers and that AJAX emphasizes the value of the code that resides within the server.
I must say that at first I was quite surprised that she wouldn’t agree with my statement since AJAX pages usually include a hell of a lot of JavaScript code. To me it was evident that this got in the way of having a clean “view” layer. However, after rereading the e-mail I realized that Ana had a web-designer background and I started to understand.
From a web designer perspective, it makes a lot of sense to consider the “view” layer everything that runs inside the browser. This allows them to work on a much larger projects and grab a larger part of the total application value. Today, most web designers working on large web applications only have a marginal role in the application development. They usually only develop templates that are later used by the application developers.
However, from an enterprise application developer perspective, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Web pages developed using AJAX, specially recent complex applications such as Zimbra (http://www.zimbra.com) cannot usually be designed by web designers. That is because those pages do include some application code that is not trivial. Therefore, developers will argue that they have to develop those pages. They will probably also argue that web designers usually do not use version control systems or understand customer requisites. The idea is that by separating the two layers it becomes more difficult to manege the project as a whole. Using different languages for each tier (JavaScript and Java, for example) doesn’t make the problem any easier. That is why large corporations tend to prefer a single programming model such as J2EE.
In the end we must recognize that there is a power struggle going on between developers and designers. Both want a large share of the pie. Right now designers have the higher ground in smaller accounts while developers rule the corporate world.