(Kim Moutsos) When Thomas Gregg landed in the human resources department at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 1997, he faced a thicket of homegrown solutions. It’s a familiar story: Applications that originally had been designed to serve isolated departments or projects had grown into
Other News
IBM Offers New SMB iSeries Packaging, More Flexible Pricing
(Cheryl D. Ross) Since Rochester served up its big iSeries i5 announcement in spring 2004, it has dished out follow-up announcements somewhat sparingly, offering new hardware packaging here, a virtualization improvement there — but no big meaty hardware or software upgrade. That’s because IBM figure
DataSets vs. Collections
(Dino Esposito) In software, five years is like a geological era. Five years ago, the Microsoft .NET Framework had just been announced. Since then, the DataSet has emerged as the key object for performing a variety of data-related tasks in .NET-based applications. Five years ago, the DataSet was
Working XML: Safe coding practices, Part 2
(Benoît Marchal) In this installment, I continue my discussion of common XML pitfalls and, perhaps more importantly, show you how to avoid them. My previous column focused on frequent misunderstandings in the use of the XML syntax itself. Here, I look at how to integrate XML support into an applicat
Database Interaction with PL/SQL: Nested Blocks in Depth
(Jagadish Chatarji) This is part eight of a series of articles focusing on database interactions with Oracle PL/SQL. In my previous article, I gave an introduction to user defined exceptions and nested blocks in PL/SQL. In this article, we will look into handling more than one exception and differen
MySQL Oddities
(Ian Gilfillan) For a number of years Ian Barwick has maintained an excellent page called MySQL Gotchas. These are MySQL features, which do not work as expected according to either the SQL standard, or the way other common relational databases would do things. I have been sent the link to this page
Build Rich Web Applications with OpenLaszlo
(Edmon Begoli) OpenLaszlo, an open source framework sponsored by LaszloSystems, has attracted a significant attention after Earthlink, the second largest Internet Service Provider, announced that it will use OpenLaszlo technology for its new generation of interactive Web mail clients. OpenLaszlo
Weaving WebSphere: Debugging iSeries HLLs in WDSc
(Joe Pluta) This is a packed article. First, I’m going to address debugging in WDSc, with the idea of making you the windshield. This topic is coming to you by popular demand; a number of you wrote in after my last column and asked me to address debugging, and since I write for you, your wish is my
Filtering and Sorting in ADO.NET – Overview
(Martin Zahn) ADO.NET supports many ways to manage memory-resident data returned in a DataSet. In this article you will see that ADO.NET exposes addidional functionality to the ways you can sort and filter data.
Application Security Becomes a Priority
(Chris Wysopal) Gone are the days when security breaches could be pushed aside and dealt with behind closed doors. Information security breaches are now front-page news. While it is unclear how many security breaches can be blamed on insecure technology, the incidents point to potential gaps in appl