Peter Zadrozny

I have always enjoyed Scott McNealy's knack for analogies, and this one is really right on the money: "Open Source is free like a puppy is free. There are long term costs and hassles, and occasional cleanup jobs." As I have stated in previous occasions, the fact that software is open source and thus free doesn't automatically make it good. I'm not going to rehash on all the arguments about open source, but will instead focus specifically on this comment from McNealy. Sometime in my dark past I used to be a VP of IT (or CIO as they are called nowadays). When I had to justify a project I started by assuming a lifespan of 10 years, of which approximately 1 year was dedicated to the development. The other 9 years were spent in day-to-day usage of the application, which repre... (more)

Mobile Auctions with 12snap

In October 1999 12snap's main goal was the development and commercial implementation of the world's first wireless shopping platform for existing mobile devices as well as WAP-enabled phones. The first application allowed mobile phone users across Germany to participate in auctions through a combination of voice, cell broadcast, and short messages, all based on the GSM technology so popu... (more)

The Cost of Marshalling

For those of us who are always looking to optimize our code and improve performance by squeezing out a few milliseconds here and there, marshalling is one of those areas that you expect to be so bloated that you would think you could improve performance many times if you could get your hands on it. This article will explore this area by running a set of experiments to actually understand ... (more)

BPEL To The Rescue: A Real-World Account on SOA Web Services

After spending much of last year learning to use the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to orchestrate Web Services and realize the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), we felt it was time for us to climb down off the bleeding edge of the razor and share our story about the real-world realities of implementing a BPEL-based project. Policy Studies, Inc. (PSI) provides... (more)

The Performance of EJB 3.0

We've all heard about the simplicity and power of the EJB 3.0 specification. And because this has proven to be true, we can't help but think that performance must be rather poor. After all, all that simplicity must come at a price. With this in mind, we set out to test EJB 3.0's performance using Oracle's implementation of the specification. Although the implementation we used is a deve... (more)