Tugdual Grall

Today's Internet-driven business environment is forcing companies to become more agile, enabling them to react quickly to changes in global markets and respond decisively to moves by competitors. At the same time, companies also need to use disparate internal and external systems as never before. Web Services, which are increasingly manifest in the corporate world through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives, address a number of the challenges and requirements facing the corporate world. These new paradigms are dramatically altering how applications are defined, developed, and used to support the needs of the enterprise. In this article we examine the impact Web Services as a technology have had on enterprise IT. We'll specifically focus on the connectivity Web Services provide; the evolution of software development from silos of functionality to SOA; and... (more)

Scripting Languages Ease Development and Administration

As developers or system administrators, we all have common tasks that must be replicated again and again. A few examples might be creating a new feature test, populating a test database with data, copying data from a file system to a database, or creating new user accounts.... You get the idea. Scripting languages share a number of characteristics that make them ideal for managing such redundant tasks: Their built-in abstract data types let them easily manipulate lists, arrays, or other composite structures. Also, the languages are often extended with regular expression support a... (more)