Quick Response (QR) codes are intended to help direct users quickly and easily to information about products and services, but they are also starting to be used for social engineering exploits. This article looks at the emergence of QR scan scams and the rising concern for users today....

This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the...

Defining "Who sees what" and "who does what" are the two important aspects of access control in any software application. "Security" is a much larger subject, but this article focuses on just the access control aspects of Security in a software application. When you build a custom ap...

Performance is one word that is used to describe multiple scenarios when talking about application performance. When someone says I need a High Performance Application, it might mean any/all of the following: Low web latency application ( meaning low page loading times) Application t...

Today’s web sites are often cluttered up with third-party content that slows down page load and rendering times, hampering user experience. In my first blog post, I discussed how third-party content impacts your website’s performance and identified common problems with its integration....

Nearly every enterprise can benefit from deduplication. Business data has been growing exponentially. Routine backups of that data have become too costly or simply ineffective. Deduplication can help by reducing the cost of primary and secondary storage. Essentially, limited resources ...

Most Java performance opportunities fall into one or more of the following categories: Using a more efficient algorithm. The largest gains in the performance of an application come from the use of a more efficient algorithm. The use of a more efficient algorithm allows an application ...

The term Business Transactions and Business Transaction Management is widely used in the industry but it’s not always well understood what we really mean by it. The BTM Industry Portal provides some good articles on this topic and is definitely recommended to check out. The general goa...

What does it mean to have a good experience? Think of your favorite restaurant, the interior of your car, and the software on your phone: how do people craft these experiences? What details, planning, and design go into the process? Would it be possible to create a great experience i...

It is time to invest in the advanced technology that provides the foundation and tools for the people and processes to meet their true potential. This means investing in the organizational construct known as a business technology Center of Excellence (CoE). The general concept of a bu...

Business design is set to undergo a dramatic transformation. The convergence of ecosystem automation and autonomics, architecture for continuously evolving business, together with the merger of consumer and business IT will have a profound impact on conventional business models, which ...

Object Relational Technologies form the backbone of most of the enterprise Java applications. Choosing the appropriate technology however is one of the most important decisions for an enterprise architect. More often than not, such a decision is either a hit or miss. Mistakes done in s...

With the onslaught of mobile devices and platforms from multiple vendors, the current technology underpinnings of mobility solutions are in a state of flux. With the hype surrounding the hardware and software offerings across the mobility solutions, it is a challenge for enterprises to...

Dart is a new structured data programming language from Google. While unstructured data has become extremely useful, structured data is still extremely important because it keeps businesses running day in and day out. Programming languages still need to be coded by hand and most Google...

Is MapReduce the Holy Grail answer to the pressing problem of processing, analyzing and making sense of large and growing data volumes? Certainly it has potential in this arena, but there is a distressing gap between the amount of hype this technology – and its spinoffs – has received ...

When you wake up in the morning and flip on a light switch, you don’t think about whether the local power company has enough electricity available to power the light. Likewise, when you switch on the coffee pot or turn on your stove to make breakfast, you don’t wonder about the availab...

If you are in IT, there is good chance that you are maintaining multiple B2B integration systems for data exchange and translation. Every IT leader has considered consolidating these products into a single B2B suite to reduce costs and improve supply chain agility. Historically, each B...

The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent. Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing se...

Few areas of human endeavor can match the pace of change in IT. Even by IT standards, the change being driven by cloud computing sometimes seems surprising. To refer to a virtual environment that has only recently been deployed as “legacy,” as some organizations are now doing, undersco...

Enterprises are turning to enabling technologies such as data virtualization support the accessibility, security, consistency, quality and auditability capabilities required for effective data governance. As with motherhood and apple pie, who can argue with data governance? Business...

Successful business intelligence (BI) solutions serve as many business users as possible. As more users use it, the more value the solution brings. However, if you’ve had any experience with BI, you must have noticed that as the number of users grow – so does the complexity (and cons...

The biggest issue for the today's enterprises is the ways and means of measuring their computing / processing workloads that need to run their business and then work on the ways and means of optimizing the same. Workload is the amount of work assigned to, or done by, a client, workgro...

The business case for unified, 360° views of key enterprise data is compelling. But enterprises are complex. And enterprise IT is even more so. Data is siloed everywhere. Getting a single view of anything can be a significant challenge.

Cloud computing has now passed the stage of hype to reality. More and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of remote hosting of IT services rather than local IT management, especially as managing and operating IT networks and services is not getting any easier. Managing IT net...

Cloud Computing is an evolution of existing technologies to deliver services to end users. Communication service providers have an early adopter opportunity to compete with new entrants, increase their bottom line and play a dominant role in delivering cloud services. Service provid...

Part 2 of "RESTful Web Services: A Quick-Start How-To Guide" explores foundational issues in coding RESTful operations, including Basic Authentication and Exception handling. Along the way I’ll share with you multiple real-world coding tips and workarounds. As a teenager, one of my fa...

One sure fire way to keep budget and buzz away from your projects is for you and your department to be associated with incremental improvement. Projects can generally be classified into two categories. The first is “business transformation,” which includes projects that generate excite...

Unlike the Ritz where the highly trained staff can anticipate your needs just by the look in your face, most enterprises’ huge investments in CRM systems, marketing analytics, customer self-service and more have resulted in islands of nonintegrated automation and inconsistent, inaccess...

Finding the perfect balance of influence between IT and the Business Owners (I will resist the urge to refer to them as B.O.) is not easy. I usually find that most projects are influenced by one or the other in an unbalanced manner. The story is usually goes like this... The business...

I will demonstrate how to ARP poison a connection between a Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 Server using Cain. The Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) provides remote display and input capabilities over network connections for Windows-based applications running on a server. RDP is ...

Among PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET’s new features comes the ability to use WCF to call RESTful web services. This article, the first in a two-part series, provides a PowerBuilder 12.5 .NET developer with the foundational knowledge and skills to rapidly get up and running building PowerBuilde...

We are using the local port forwarding bound on a victim host so when we execute the route command and exploit internal hosts we can map them back to our initial victim, through the meterpreter connection and back to us. The Metasploit Framework is a penetration testing toolkit, explo...

I’ve been programming since around 1982, first using an Apple in high school and then finally getting my first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000 (2k of ROM and 2k of RAM), that same year. Both computers came with a form of the BASIC programming language and it was the start of my lifel...

This excerpt describes fundamental terms and concepts associated with service-oriented computing, including those related to service-oriented architecture, service-orientation, and cloud computing. Service-oriented computing is an umbrella term that represents a new generation distri...

Unstructured and XML semi structured data is now used more than structured data. Unstructured data is useful because of its fuzzy processing applied to this more common ubiquitous data. But fixed structured data still keeps businesses running day in and day out which requires consiste...

As IT systems form the backbone of business operations, their performance plays a key role in business growth. Understanding this fact, organizations work toward obtaining best performance from the software systems to maximize ROI on IT. Now an application’s performance can be improved...

While much discussion of the cloud assumes the needs and concerns of large enterprises will determine how the cloud evolves, in fact AAPL, MSFT, DELL, AMZN signal that the migration of the fragmented $444B annual SMB tech spend from small datacenters to the cloud will redefine the indu...

Data Virtualization Platforms promise to bring order to the chaos of today’s data landscape through a range of agility, flexibility, as well as the potential for reduced cost and risk benefits. These benefits are the drivers behind the exploding industry demand, which in turn, is attr...

What is a unit test? A unit test is: Repeatable: You can rerun the same test as many times as you want. Consistent: Every time you run it, you get the same result. (for example: Using threads can produce an inconsistent result) In Memory: It has no "hard" dependencies on anything no...

The OSGi framework is a popular platform for developing multifunctional desktop systems, enterprise systems and complex applications. OSGi uses a modular approach where each bundle is regarded as a relatively independent and separate unit. The framework controls maintenance-based tas...